


The Tides of Mustafar

by buckstiel



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Force-Sensitive Poe Dameron, Friends to Lovers, Grief/Mourning, Identity Issues, M/M, Past Character Death, Post-Movie(s), Rescue Missions, Sexual Content, Slow Burn, The Dark Side of the Force, The Force, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-31
Updated: 2016-07-31
Packaged: 2018-07-28 12:08:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 110,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7639633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckstiel/pseuds/buckstiel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Poe grew up under the shade of the Force-tree his mother brought back from the war. </p>
<p>He never expected its reach to stretch to a First Order star destroyer across the galaxy, where he found himself captive once again after a mission gone awry.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I would say "this got away from me," but it's probably time to admit that I've never really had a handle on these sorts of things.
> 
> There's a lot of galaxy traveling in this fic, so I marked up a [copy of the map](http://i.imgur.com/bG8EAEc.jpg) that I used as reference in case any of y'all want to have it while reading. Along those same lines, I know the EU is dead and all, but I still pulled some world building regarding planets and more distant history--taking the "applicable until proven otherwise" approach.
> 
> Innumerable thanks to quidnunc-life for being my lovely beta and lovelier friend as I tried to figure out what I was doing. (And another set of thanks to whoever had to listen to me yelling into my hands about this.)

Finn had heard sirens like this before. The smearing, nasal wail was a prominent part of life on the Starkiller base: close in your ear jolting you from sleep, echoing across the empty plains between different sector posts. Most often, it had been accompanied by the steady rhythm of stormtrooper boots on the corridor floors. A smattering beat, not perfectly in step, but close enough to mimic the heartbeats behind the shiny white breastplates--the sirens were just one noise in the commotion. He never had time to consider it in singular, away from the other pieces of the scene.

It was many of the unprecedented consequences of Dantooine. 

These sirens were quieter than the ones Hux had employed, but as they rang through the situation room on D’Qar, no one moved. No one ran to their blasters or to throw on a flight vest, with helmets slipping from fingers and thonking to the cracking concrete in the rush. And no one, not even General Organa, reprimanded anyone else for their lack of action. 

Knuckles turned white on the edge of the holo-projector in the center of the room. Finn couldn’t tell if anyone else was even breathing--despite the sirens, his own breath felt too loud in his ears, too brash and out of place as the sirens kept at it, shifting between the same two pitches over and over and over. The white noise of the hustle to mobilize had muffled it in all his years in the First Order, and with his fellow Resistance fighters frozen beside him, what the sirens truly meant hit deep in his chest for the first time-- _something has gone terribly, terribly wrong._

* * *

 

But it wasn’t supposed to go wrong. Things never were, of course, but Dantooine especially. Dantooine wasn’t a scouting mission that any of the lower-level, newer recruits could have handled, flying down towards the other pole of the planet or to some of the other worlds in the Ileenium system. Nor was it anything that would have required stealth, not a Jakku, meeting with the General’s mysterious old friends in village tents among forgotten sand dunes. Really, Snap had told Admiral Ackbar in the days leading up to it, they could technically take that old a-wing whose blasters had been busted for months and things would be fine.

“That would be asking for trouble, Wexley,” he’d said. Not like asking for the trouble would have really mattered, in the end, but there had been no way to know that then.

The afternoon before the mission was supposed to take place, General Organa pulled a hologram of the planet up in the situation room with all officers and pilots slumped into their usual seats or against their usual spots on the wall. Rey and Skywalker hovered near the back, near the door to the bunk wings. They had been back for just over two weeks, and it had taken just under two minutes for the rest of the base to realize that Skywalker’s presence was something that altered the very air around them in a way none of them could describe. The General’s words came out differently, with the same amount of assertion as they always had, but something else was there, something Skywalker brought back with him.

Rey’s attention was split between the General and Finn, and she offered him a small smile over the crowd of the officers’ heads.

Dantooine: an isolated planet on the outer rim on the other side of the galaxy from D’Qar. Wholly insignificant in the grand scheme of things as they stood in the present day, but there was a time, the General said curtly, when Dantooine held a base just like this one, but smaller. When its path briefly crossed with that of Alderaan and was allowed to keep on going. 

“The Rebel Alliance wasn’t based there for very long,” she said, “but we had to leave quickly and couldn’t transfer all our data in time. Some of it is still in the systems in the abandoned facility, though we did what we could to hide that there was anything still there.” 

With its distant location and the rest of the war raging throughout the galaxy, any thought of searching the base had apparently been tossed aside, a luxury that wouldn’t be afforded to future bases. “The First Order apparently decided to go back through old Imperial records and found a stack of places that never got raided. Dantooine is, from our analysis, the last place they’re going to go. We need to get that data before they do.” 

In and out. A half-day’s trip with the right pilot and the right tech. With the only reports of stormtroopers and TIE fighters all the way in Geonosis, the pilots murmured among themselves, it was less of a mission and more of an errand. 

“It still has to be done,” Admiral Statura said sharply, and the chatter fell away. “And soon. Ideally three days from now.” 

But not a soul would volunteer--unusual, Finn heard the General muttering to the next-in-command, because if a simple errand meant getting out of drill duty for the day or scrubbing down the astromechs, the names in the pot would have been overflowing. But the vines of gossip curled around the halls of the base faster than biology should have allowed: Nien Nunb’s birthday was coming up, and the whole crew had been planning the surprise party for weeks. Snap had brewed his own booze in an old washtub in Besh Wing’s abandoned medbay, and Jessika had corralled the rest of the pilots into figuring out how not to set the crew kitchen on fire. 

Couldn’t the errand wait one more day? Just until after the party. 

“And send someone through hyperspace hungover?” the General said without looking up from her notes, and that was that. 

Of course Poe was the one to step forward. And it wasn’t that he was necessarily self-sacrificing, Finn thought, at least in this instance; but more so that he was pragmatic. Understood his own strengths and limitations like he knew how to breathe. 

“I was just in charge of decorations anyway,” he told Finn the night before he left. Their shared room was bigger than anything he had been allotted with the First Order, but with the way Poe lived--cluttered and open in a mirror of how every emotion would flit across his face--it was effectively just as cramped. “Jessika won’t let me near the kitchen after--well, you obviously weren’t there, but…” Poe sighed, tossed the shirt he had meant to fold over his shoulder. “I wanted to make a cake. The oven nearly exploded.” 

Maybe Finn should have been surprised at the somewhat sheepish confession--but he snorted instead, and Poe threw the shirt at him, missing, the cloth brushing against his elbow before falling to the floor in a flump.

“I’ve never actually been to Dantooine, you know,” Poe said later that night. The base was quiet save for the clunking old pipes scraping against the inside of the concrete walls and the night was pressing on Finn’s eyes before his pupils adjusted--the grimy ceiling could have been a starless expanse of the night sky for all he knew, and he did know that Poe was looking at the same. That was what they did, lay on their backs and stare up past the confines of their bunk into the vast emptiness where they both had come from only to end up on the same solitary rock. 

“The planet was near my home world,” Poe continued, “but we never had reason to go. Never had a whole lot of reason to leave, period. My dad didn’t, at least, not after--well.” There was a long intake of breath from Poe’s side of the room, but the sigh never came, like he had decided to swallow the words he’d caught in his throat for safekeeping. “And he took a while to let me fly off-planet on my own. By then…” 

“There were too many other things to see.”

“Right.” 

Silence fell between them, and Poe’s breathing evened out; when Finn couldn’t sleep, he would count Poe’s breaths instead of the loth-cats in the remedy Snap had offered up over a groggy breakfast months ago. 

“Where do you want to go?” Poe asked suddenly. 

“I wouldn’t begin to know,” he said, because it was true--he had been to the Starkiller and Jakku and Takodana and here, D’Qar, it was the longest time he had stayed on an actual planet, a real planet. He didn’t know the galaxy outside of a few key names before his defection. The Hosnian system, that was always at the head of the discussion, though--his stomach sank. Names of other systems and planets only trickled down through the glossy white ranks in the legends smeared with the fingerprints of the First Order’s propaganda machine. 

Tatooine, the double-edged sword of a desert giving rise to that hand that would build the Empire and the hand that would destroy it. Hoth, the site of a decisive flexing of the Empire’s strength. A few of the higher-ranking officers would mention Naboo and tales of a fearsome lord of the Dark Side who had felled the original master of one of the Jedi’s last great heroes.

“Wherever Rey found Luke sounded pretty nice,” Poe yawned. “All that water…”

“What about your home world?” 

The blankets rustled across the room, and when Finn pulled his gaze from the ceiling to look, Poe had turned to his side and was staring right at him. His features were muted shades of gray-blue in the dark now, not just lost to the black, and his eyebrows pulled together in a question he didn’t have to say. 

“What was it like, Poe?”

Poe’s eyes dropped to a lone boot on the room’s rug. “Trees. Old Rebel Alliance bases and huge temples that were even older. Mainly trees… and one, my--my mother brought it back after the war.” He smiled, wide across his face and lost in details he wasn’t sharing, but as he began to speak again, it faded. “It was just a twig then. I helped her plant it in the little clearing in front of our house. By the time I was seven, it was twenty feet tall with these thin, golden leaves that never died. She said it was Force-sensitive.” He met Finn’s gaze for half a second before flipping over to his back again, and the break of the eye contact snapped the subject closed.

“You gotta tell me about Dantooine when you get back, though,” he said, and when Poe didn’t say anything, he added, “I need to start making my list of planets to see.” 

And Poe laughed--or, not so much laughed as exhaled sharp and quick with the small tic up of his lips that he would do every time one of the pilots muttered something under their breath at a briefing. “I can do better than that, buddy,” he said. “If it’s nice, I’ll take you there. Once General Organa says it’s safe, of course.” A beat--“I could show you Yavin 4, too. If you wanted.” 

And that was that: the top of the list, Dantooine and Yavin 4, plus the promise to start brainstorming the rest, charting the route around the galaxy, the best spots to see the wafting towers of gas clouds light-years beyond the Outer Rim lit up green and yellow from the distant starlight. He could use some time off anyway, Poe had muttered before drifting to sleep. 

He was gone before Finn woke up. 

And then, hours later, there were the sirens.

* * *

 

For an indeterminate amount of time, Poe was only aware of the small rocks and sticks digging into his back, dry blades of grass trying to poke through the fabric of his flight suit, and the ground--dirt under it all, solid and heavy and cracked from the blistering Dantooine summers he’d heard about from traveling pilots as a child. Or maybe he had just dreamt it, filled in the gaps once he woke up, because the jolting lurch that gripped his whole chest when the unforgiving stormtrooper gloves closed around his arms had to have meant something. He had to have lurched from somewhere, a dark expanse of nothing until suddenly there was a wall where his memory should have kept reaching back. 

His feet weren’t cooperating, but the stormtroopers dragged him up the small hill ahead of them anyway. 

_This is bad_ \--the thought came to him quietly, vaguely. No panic, not yet. To his right there was a smoking ship, like his x-wing but with more scratches along the paint on the nose and-- 

It hit him. Getting shot out of the sky, crashing, the astromech unit he borrowed from a mechanic while BB-8 was getting their tune-up immediately fried. A large gash on the back of his left hand. A stinging red blur in his eyes as something-- _blood, that’s blood_ \--dribbled there. 

_No, no--_ his voice wasn’t working and his legs were jelly, wobbly when he tried to set his stance, close to powerless to fight back against the stormtroopers roughing him up as they approached their ship in the distance. The same low lights he had seen descend to Jakku the night of his first capture sat waiting for him here. 

Across the galaxy, history repeating itself. 

Only this time: the best pilot of the resistance captured not for a reckless, emotion-driven attack, but for letting his guard down. Assuming too much. Letting his thoughts stray back to the night before with Finn and focusing a little too hard on curating the list of planets and moons to a reasonable number. Poe Dameron, bested by his own ego and now-- 

Now-- 

He hadn’t eaten since his early dinner the night before and there wasn’t much for his stomach to push back up his throat at the thought, but stars, did it try. A splatter of bile burned the back of his tongue, acrid, and he tried not to think about it, what was waiting for him. The implications of it all spread out before him in his splotchy, blurring vision, stones in the deep puddles that would spring up in front of his house on Yavin 4 during the rains. _Plunk plunk plunk,_ and the ripples would rush past in every direction, crash against the grass, drown the bugs that got swept up in the ebb. 

Again his empty stomach clenched. He gagged, and the troopers pulled him harder. 

He was dropped to the ground, as far as he could tell, metal lurching up to meet the side of his face as the gripped support at his arms disappeared, and it pushed against him again--so they had taken off. Left his ship an abandoned, burned wreck in the middle of the field. No hope of contacting base and giving them even the slightest clue what happened to him. 

_No hope--_

His eyes were sealed shut. Or he couldn’t see, was starting to black out. Either way. 

A boot rolled him to the wall of the ship’s hull as they rocketed to lightspeed, and as his thoughts grew fuzzier and the pain along his head and limbs twinged and pulsed, he thought of his wrists. How they were still free in front of his face, how at breakfast the day before-- _just yesterday, was it just yesterday_ \--Finn’s hand had latched there when Poe had reached to snag a piece of fruit from Rey’s plate that looked like it wasn’t going to get eaten. His hand had been warm, his fingers long enough to latch around Poe’s wrist completely.

And Poe tried to hold onto that feeling. Remember it. The constraints were coming, clinical and heavy, and the lock on his head would be picked open.

_No hope_ \-- 

********** 

On Yavin 4, the sunset would burn a brilliant lavender before settling into black, the entire galaxy speckling the sky so far away from the main trading station. Poe hadn’t seen a lavender in the sky like it since. But it was here again, here lining the tips of the trees around the clearing, right in his eyes and the Force-sensitive tree--it was twice as tall, three times as tall. It kept growing into the sky, looming over him, and the golden leaves wafted down to the earth. Sharp as razors. They sliced his hands and burned without burning--white-hot, but so much that shocks of ice shot up his veins.

The sky was lavender and he knew he was twenty and ready to leave the moon to join the New Republic’s air fleet. He knew his house was behind him and his father was calling him to come inside, to have one last meal before embarking. He knew his mother was dead but he could hear her too, beside his father, promising something he couldn’t quite make out. 

When he turned, the lavender sky fizzed away into the bright midday sun, blue and cloudless. The house had an extra story, a lopsided single room thrown on top of the second floor, a person in the doorway who shouldn’t have been there.

“Poe,” she said, “This was all for you.” 

_What was?_ But his throat closed around the question and held it there. Saying anything would just distract from the image: Shara Bey, veteran pilot of the Battle of Endor, whole and standing there just looking at him, _looking_ , and her face was both nothing and everything like his moth-eaten memories had kept safe for the last twenty-four years. 

She spoke again, but the whisper birds had begun to chatter and drowned her out, and he suddenly couldn’t remember what her voice sounded like--he turned back towards the tree, taller still and now in the cover of night without a single star in the sky, the galaxy blotted out. 

But the tree, the tree’s leaves shone brilliantly, glaring into his vision and forcing him to throw up a hand, stagger back-- 

********** 

His eyes flew open and he desperately tried to suck air into his empty lungs. 

It was even the same room, the clamps around his ankles and wrists just too tight in the way that woke him up in the middle of the night sweating through the sheets. 

Something dripped down his temple, hot and slow. The last time he had been here, it was blood. It could be sweat now. He couldn’t be sure. Fear was something the other pilots joked about, saying he didn’t have it, that he had taken his fair share and divvied it up when they weren’t looking and slipped it into the rest of the base’s coffee at breakfast. 

“Aren’t you the least bit scared you’re going to _die_ out there one day pulling one of those stunts?” Jessika had half-yelled after one mission a few months before Jakku. It was behind the closed door of his bunk but the whole squadron could hear it, the General could have probably heard it, but the mission was successful even if he had been in free-fall over the ocean-drenched Kamino for a solid minute. And the reminder of that didn’t stop her from collapsing into the pinched glare he knew hid every emotion she didn’t want him to see. It didn’t stop her from slamming the door so hard that BB-8 ducked behind the bedside table. 

It wasn’t that he was scared to die. That was the furthest thing from the truth. 

He was a little scared of what came before, right before. In the Republic fleet, his first bunkmate had gone up in flames on their third mission run, and the nightmares plagued him until the next time he strapped into his x-wing. The quiet moment, a vacuum, and then the crack that separated his life into saveable and not--the nightmare would hum in the crack and watch the flames sparking out of the controls slowly lick towards his fingers, never quite reaching. That was for the after. 

The knowledge in that crack that death was coming wasn’t the part he feared. It was everything else, the immensity of everything else. Death he could deal with. 

The _everything else_ was smelted into the metal that made the cuffs where he was held.

The _everything else_ was the slick glossy black of the eyes of the stormtrooper’s helmet at the door of the room. He wondered what their designation was. What planet they came from. What they looked like. 

“You were the Resistance pilot that escaped with FN-2187,” she said suddenly. 

“Sure was,” he said. His voice had grown raspy since the crash and the words stung the back of his throat. “His name’s Finn now, you know.” 

“If anyone in the First Order was going to commit treason, it would’ve been FN-2187,” she said, and the bit of disgust coloring her voice burned into a swell in his chest. 

“ _Finn_.”

The hard plastic plates of her armor clacked as she reset her stance and shoulders. Tightened her grip on the large blaster resting against her arm. “Don’t expect that to happen again.”

“A stormtrooper rescuing me, or Finn rescuing me?” And he bit his tongue against the taunt that rose there, because there might not have been hope from the pragmatic side of it all, but in the infinites of possibilities--a realm that, to Poe, looked a lot like the galaxy as he stretched into hyperspace-- _rescue_ and _Finn_ were one in the same. Two celestial bodies twisting in space, never quite certain which one was orbiting the other. 

“Either.” 

He snorted, which hurt deep in his chest--an internal bruise that he hadn’t had time to assess, strained lungs, even a cracked rib, _something_ \--but he couldn’t focus on the source of the pain. The finality with which she spoke dug a knuckle wherever he wasn’t already injured and added to the patchwork of purples and greens that surely lined his skin. 

_No hope_ \--no. No, there had to be hope. Wasn’t that the point of that story the General had shared with him and Snap late one night waiting for Nien Nunb and Ello’s scouting mission to return? _Nothing survived outside overnight on Hoth. Until something did._

So: hope. He scourged, found a sliver of it to put before his mind’s eye and hold there--but the door to the room hissed open, and the clunk of boots seized in his lungs. The low garbled voice ordering the stormtrooper to another post, it had perched on the edge of his eardrums for so long with perfect balance and finally it was tipping forward in a rush. 

“Are you really the best pilot of the Resistance,” Kylo Ren said slowly, “if you manage to get captured twice?” He didn’t allow any time for Poe to answer. “I think we have some unfinished business to attend to.”

* * *

 

“Why is no one kriffing _doing anything?”_

Whatever the walls of the bunk wings were made of resonated with Jessika’s voice in a way none of the other pilots could imitate, so even in the close space it echoed and vibrated down around the corners where so many of the squadron had skulked off to once the sirens had been shut off. Part of her wished that she could have expected this, muttered a bitter _typical_ under her breath and stomped back to elbow her way into the back of the officers’ meeting--but it wasn’t. It was anything _but_ typical, and she was ready to kick all of their sorry asses to the far end of the Outer Rim and back to knock everything back into the way it was supposed to be.

Or--as close as possible to the way it was supposed to be, given the circumstances. 

She stopped in the middle of the hall, peered into the cracked door that led to Finn and Poe’s room, saw it dark and empty. Her breaths were coming in isolated huffs now, and even if she were to follow instinct and trudge back to the situation room, there wouldn’t be a meeting to crash: just the General and Skywalker pinching the bridges of their noses in silence while Rey and Finn wavered behind them, shifting constantly on the balls of their feet. Finn was wringing his hands until Rey wrenched them apart by putting one in hers, and the glance that passed between them appeared blank, but Jessika assumed a long time ago--and confirmed when Rey first came back--that there existed around those two an odd sort of bubble that distorted the reality of things to everyone outside. Everyone but them.

It was difficult to watch, the doing nothing, the flat empty strategy board when Poe was out there, he had to still be out there--

“Listen.” And somehow her feet had developed a mind of their own and pulled her back to the command center. The scene was just how she had imagined it, the way it had been when she angrily followed after the rest of the pilots. 

The General frowned. “Pava--” 

“You’re acting like he’s _dead!”_

She saw Finn swallow stiffly out of the corner of her eye, and if she had been paying closer attention to those smudges of the edge of her vision, perhaps she could have said for sure if Rey and Skywalker both turned to him, as if they felt the shift under his skin.

“We’re not,” Finn said. “We’re not doing that at all.” The words started tumbling out of his mouth in some feigned attempt at being casual, and the mask was paper thin.

What the mask was supposed to be covering, that Jessika couldn’t put her finger on.

“He didn’t die on Jakku, and he didn’t die on Dantooine,” she said quickly but her volume was fading, becoming something denser, and Rey’s feet shifted. Just slightly, but also just enough. “He’s not _going_ to die on Dantooine,” she clarified.

“We lost communication with his ship,” the General said. “We don’t know if he survived the crash or if he’s even still on the planet if he did.” She glanced over her shoulder at Skywalker, then back at Jessika, and there it was, just like the blow she took to the head her first week of training once she joined up. A quick feint and a one-two punch whose strength had not been gauged with the proper amount of care for a spar left her wheezing flat on her back. It was only supposed to have been a spar. A placement test, even. And Iolo had leveled her.

It was happening again, but bruises heal. They couldn’t just pull another Poe Dameron out of the ground. 

Who was supposed to lead the squadrons against the swarm of TIE fighters the next time they did anything bigger than a damn errand and who was supposed to remind Snap to check that one tricky regulator in the bottom right engine during maintenance and who was supposed to sit up with her at odd hours of the night before a day off and drink Bespinian liquor straight from the bottle?

“So you _lost_ him?” she said. And she had moved into the dangerous sort of quiet, that notorious sort that even the newer pilots in the airfield had learned to fear, and so what if she was talking to the General and Luke kriffing Skywalker, so what, so what, surely they needed to know how her ears were ringing with it, how her stomach was curling in on itself. “You don’t lose a pilot. A person. You lose--you lose socks. In Major Ematt’s case that one time, sometimes you lose _all_ of your socks. But not--”

“That’s enough, Pava.” The General straightened the set of her shoulders and felt ten times larger than she had moments ago, and Jessika’s mouth laid open, muted mid-word. “Don’t assume that you know what our priorities are with this.” And after a pause--“ _Dismissed_.”

She fought the urge to huff, instead turning on her heel and pushing through the doors back to the bunk wing. If she pressed her lips into a thin enough line, put all the pressure there, maybe she could keep the stinging at the corners of her eyes at bay. No, Jessika Pava didn’t _cry,_ she never _cried_ , not when Iolo had nearly broken her nose in that sparring match and not when she left her tearful grandmother on Corulag to join the Resistance. Not when her bunkmates didn’t come home from a mission.

But something was welling up and starting to blur pockets of her vision, so maybe it didn’t count as crying if it was born of frustration.

“‘Don’t assume you know what our priorities are,’” she muttered to the empty room her feet finally led her to, and the leftovers from Nien Nunb’s party looked dejected in the vacant space under the haphazard decorations they had thrown together in Poe’s absence. Like it was all mocking her. “Sure, sure, easy to say from your side, General, when you know what the hell is going on and everyone else is left in the dark.”

Someone had left a plate with a piece of half-eaten cake on the couch, the fork sliced halfway in and left abandoned. She fell into the spot beside it, picked at the corners which were already well on their way to stale. The atmosphere on D’Qar was unforgiving to baked goods. 

“There’s still a war to fight,” she said a bit louder, and the cake may have started to dry out but it still tasted fantastic and better than anything she would have found to stress-eat in the cafeteria. “First Order’s near Geonosis now, and Geonosis isn’t that far from here and they know we’re in this system now and--pfassk, General, you more than anyone should know Poe puts down half the TIE fighters in any given battle and-- _what_ , Snap?”

He tried for an easy grin as he leaned against the entryway and it was wholly unconvincing. “Just wanted to check in… see if you were okay… you know, as I do.”

That grin became a lot more difficult to maintain the longer she glared at him in silence. Finally his shoulders slumped and he trudged over to where she sat, picking up the plate of cake so he could sit in its place. “I know, dumb question.”

The thing about Snap was that he was often written off as inexpressive by the majority of the mechanics and analysts, even some of the newer pilots in the squadron, but when they read him, they only focused on the blank pages, the spaces in between the lines of text as if they couldn’t see the typeset surrounding the bits of nothing. They looked at his face when they should have been estimating the angles of his slouch or how white his knuckles were becoming as the skin stretched over the bone.

His grip on the plate of cake was turning his knuckles whiter than a freshly-cleaned pilot vest.

“Are you going to eat that, or can I continue this healthy coping mechanism in peace?” she asked, and he handed her the plate without looking at her. “And yes, it was a dumb question. Glad to see you’re picking up on that. Sure has taken you long enough.”

Without the plate, his hands had balled into fists just above his knees. Still white at those bony ridges, growing whiter still at the borders with the rest of his hand.

“It was going to happen eventually, Jess.”

“Not you too--”

“It was a miracle he came back from Jakku,” he said. “After what they did to him and the village--”

“You’re not the only one who read the reports, you know--” 

“Jessika.” Snap put a hand on her shoulder, more gentle than she had expected given the way he was gripping at the nothing just moments before, at the loss of something that should have been there to ease the strain. “You were on a supply run when he got back. He didn’t look good.”

“Of course he didn’t,” she said, eyeing a glob of icing that had gathered on her fingernail before licking it off. “Do you need a reminder of the hell he went through--”

“Something wasn’t _right_ , Jess. Look,” he sighed. “You say you read the reports? Then you know he didn’t say what the First Order did to him while they had him prisoner. Yammered on and on about how Finn rescued him, but he flat-out refused to talk about anything before that to any of the nurses. Even to the General. Or me,” he added, and his slouch deepened a few more degrees.

Poe had been back on base for two days by the time she had returned from the next planet over, the small freighter ship laden with more food and raw materials bought from the local species. The fear that had knotted in her chest unfurled and snapped, and the muggy cloudy day she had returned to was better than vibrant sunsets of her home planet. _Poe wasn’t dead_. Her best friend had lived, and he was sitting upright in medbay and talking strategy with the General and cracking jokes with Snap and Ello. _Poe was fine_.

Or: Poe had acted fine.

“So we assume the worst?” she said quietly. “What, he ran into an entire battalion of TIE fighters and took them on instead of running because he was finally given a reason to cash in on that death wish we all said he had? We don’t even _check?_ ”

Apparently they didn’t, and she crushed the paper plate and the rest of the cake in her hands, icing and crumbs oozing out the sides and onto her hands and pants and she couldn’t even pretend to care--Snap was relaying in a tempered, even tone how he had listened in on the officers meeting, how a search and rescue at this juncture didn’t make strategic sense. The First Order had been crippled by the destruction of the Starkiller base, but not as much as the Resistance had, and sending even a skeleton crew out to Dantooine when the rest of the First Order fleet was a few systems over would leave D’Qar defenseless against a possible attack.

After Jessika threw the mess of smashed cake and ripped-up plate to the ground, Snap left her alone, saying something about him being back in his bunk if she needed anything. Exactly what he said was lost in the roaring buzz that had overtaken her eardrums--eerily similar to the roar of the x-wings as they broke through a planet’s atmosphere in tight formation, the hums coming together in a grating chord.

* * *

 “Snap said not to bother her.”

“I don’t care what Snap said, frankly,” Rey said. “And _let go_ , please.”

Finn dropped her wrist and held his hands up on either side of his face, his ridiculous face that was smiling while trying to tell her, without words, how bad of an idea this was. “Look, Rey,” he said, and didn’t he see that they didn’t exactly have a lot of time to debate things? She strode past him towards where Snap and Ello had told them Jessika had holed herself up. Hopefully he would catch up and just _go along_ , because she had a good feeling about this, and Master Luke had told her an irritatingly high number of times per day to trust her feelings.

But Finn, for once, could not just go along.

“Rey, _Rey,_ please.” He stepped in front of her and she was forced to come to a stop a few inches from his face. “One thing I’ve learned from being here the past couple of months is that when someone says you shouldn’t bother Jessika, you _listen_.”

“Okay then. You listen. I’ll go talk to her.”

“ _Rey._ ”

She stepped around him and kept walking with enough purpose even for her shoes, normally silent on the base’s concrete, to smack loudly with every step. Their window was closing with every minute they wasted, and out of all the Resistance members on base, not telling Jessika what they had planned would have been--not rude, rude wasn’t the right word for it. But it wouldn’t have been _kind_ to leave without offering a slight glimmer of hope to fan in the gross pessimism that had infected the higher officers. She and Finn might not have agreed with the General and Master Luke though they didn’t dare voice it, not when an act would be so much more to the point. 

“If you’re so concerned,” she whispered once they were at the entrance to the common area, “then let me do the talking.”

When they rounded the corner, they found Jessika lying on her back with some pale stains on the front of her pants. Much of the room that was within arm’s reach of the sofa looked as if it had suffered at the hands of D’Qar’s infamous fall monsoons.

“Whatever it is, it’s not important,” Jessika said flatly.

“It’s about Poe,” Rey said.

“Please leave me alone,” she said. Most of her face was ghostly pale save for her nose, which glowed a deep pink.

Finn shot her a deflated frown of _told you so,_ but no, _no_ , he had not told her one damn thing. Not yet. “We’re going after him, Jessika. Finn and I.”

Finally Jessika turned her head away from the ceiling, took a couple long hard blinks; Rey could tell they were slightly bloodshot. “The General changed her mind?”

“Mmm… not so much,” Finn shrugged.

“Wait…” Jessika scrambled to her feet, cupped her hands over her mouth and shuffled over to them until she was only a few inches away from where the two of them stood. “You’re going against orders?”

“I have a reputation to maintain,” he said.

Jessika opened her mouth to respond, but Rey cut across her quickly--“He’s not dead, Jess, he isn’t. I can--I can feel it. He’s not dead. And if General Organa can’t spare any of the pilots to go after him, well…”

Jessika searched her face, let her mouth hang open. A nagging worry ate at the back of Rey’s head that she was going to ask her how she could possibly know that Poe was still alive when everyone else among them had consigned him to the worst fate, his own endgame that Snap insisted they had all known was coming. Rey didn’t have an answer for that. Maybe it was the Force, but Finn had sighed something about the Force probably not working like that, not if the General and Master Luke hadn’t picked up on it as well.

“We’re taking the Millennium Falcon to Dantooine tonight,” she continued. “Soon, actually.” 

“Right after we leave here,” Finn said.

“Great, I’m in,” Jessika said quickly, turning back to gather the shoes she must have kicked off since she set up vigil.

Which had not been part of the equation.

“We just wanted to let you know,” Finn said carefully, “seeing as you and Poe were really close and you were obviously upset about everything--I mean, not _obviously_ ,” he said, holding up a hand when she glared at him over her shoulder. “But me and Rey, we got this.”

“Oh, I’m coming.” Jessika pointed one of her shoes at the both of them, laces flying about with every punctuated motion she added. “Either one of you ever flown that far across the galaxy before? And don’t give me any sort of bantha fodder about how the two of you got BB-8 back here, because that was Solo. I know you’re a pilot,” she said as she shoved her bag into Rey’s arms, “but you need a professional.”

Jessika was a tad shorter than Rey, though not by much, and in that moment it didn’t seem to matter. The way she held herself added a solid six inches to her height, and the smirk she threw their way as she sprinted down to her bunk might as well have made it a solid foot of difference. Rey’s cheeks burned, only burning harder when Finn snorted. 

“Well, that went about as well as I expected it to,” he laughed. 

“Give it a rest,” she said. “Go get your things and head to the Falcon. Meet you there in five.” 

As it crept closer to seven minutes later, Rey could hardly keep from pacing at the foot of the ramp into the ship. The wildlife buzzed and croaked around them, hidden in the deep shadows cast by the trees in the waning moonlight and, at least in one corner, the solitary lamp the base kept on overnight for anyone working third shift. It would have been nice any other night--without her pulse racing, without Jessika deciding to throw the entire toolbox across the main cabin inside the ship, or whatever it was she was doing. 

“C’mon, Finn,” she muttered, and her foot jiggled against the cracked tarmac, one hand tugging at the wrap up the other arm, and-- 

“Where’s your boy?” Jessika asked, far too loud for they stealth Rey thought they needed. Her head was poking upside down out of the close side of the open hatch and grease spots cast a smeared dark line along her nose all the way to her newly-tangled hairline. “Isn’t he usually quick?”

“He’s not my--he _is_ quick, something of his probably just got lost in that junk heap of a room he shares with…” She met Jessika’s gaze for half a second before huffing and turning back towards the base entrance--behind the grease and dust caked on the sweat lining her brow, there had been a moment of softness that blurred the hard edges, and it sank to the bottom of Rey’s gut with a thump. _Don’t mention Poe. Don’t bring up Poe until you have to, focus on Finn, steady yourself--_ and the voice had shifted into Master Luke’s. 

Even Master Luke couldn’t get her heartrate to settle. 

“Hey--” Jessika said, hand reaching over Rey’s shoulder below to point at the doors which slid open with a hiss and a creak to reveal Finn, packed and ready to blast to the other side of the galaxy.

Finn, with Poe’s old repaired jacket only pulled onto one arm, his other hand gripping awkwardly at the handles of his bag. One of his shoes was falling off and it sent him half-stumbling every couple of yards as he sprinted towards them. 

“Go, _go_ , get the engine ready we need to _go_ \--” 

“What did you do--” 

“Rey, I’m serious--” 

Jessika jumped down to the ramp with a clang behind her while she was rooted to the spot watching Finn scramble for what might as well have been his life. He was telling her to run, and Jessika was half-listening to him at least, but her attention had been narrowed to a pinprick, a single thought devoid of anything but a lone exclamation point. 

And he was still running down the airstrip, but she blinked--all she did was blink--and then he was _very much in front of her_ , tugging at her elbow up the ramp, babbling on about the _urgency,_ it was _urgent_ , couldn’t she see that? Couldn’t she?

“Oh no you did _not_ ,” Jessika muttered.

Rey followed her line of sight over her shoulder: the door to the base had squeaked open once more, and the quick clunks of footsteps were unmistakable.

(One of the side effects of the Force, Rey had learned, was that it could wrap around her bones, into the very lattice of their cores, and once it snapped into place, she was three feet taller. Not in stature, but the way her body held itself against the gravity of the planet. The shadow she cast was deeper and longer and the space at the center of her _swelled_. This only happened, Rey and Master Luke had learned, when she became supremely frustrated or angry.)

“No one was supposed to know we were gone until _after we left_ ,” she hissed.

“They were going to find out in the morning anyway,” Finn said, hands jerkily searching for some explanation to latch onto, an easy eloquent way to pull the words that were tripping out of his throat. “You know, when--I don’t know, when they look outside and see the Falcon is _gone_ and we’re _gone_ and all they’ll have to do is switch on the tracker--”

“Which I kriffing disabled!” Jessika shouted, running back into the cabin. “And now you led _him_ here--”

“Master Finn! Mistress Rey! And is that Captain Pava I see?”

C3PO’s eyes were nothing but beady and menacing floating orbs in the dark, growing closer, the dull shine of his brass body shifting as the angle of the lamp and the moon changed as he clunked closer. It was a slow but steady pace, an apt way to go. Torturous. Unpleasant. She really shouldn’t have expected anything else. 

“I don’t recall seeing any scheduled maintenance on the Millennium Falcon this evening!”

“Emergency repairs,” Rey shrugged. Her mouth strained at the grin C3PO hopefully didn’t recognize was uncharacteristically bright. “Have to go pick up some supplies first thing tomorrow morning, you know. And it was making such funny noises yesterday.” 

C3PO clunked closer and Finn’s grip on her elbow tightened with every step, and finally the droid had stepped into the arc of the light from the cabin. The casual pose Finn assumed was truly terrible and not casual at all: he had propped his elbow on her shoulder, the other arm sitting against his hip, and his grin was all teeth. 

(Sometimes, mainly at times like _this_ time, Rey would briefly think back to when she first met this boy on Jakku who insisted he was with the Resistance, and she would wonder how such a terrible liar had ever successfully convinced her of anything resembling a lie.) 

“Captain Pava is scheduled to run drills tomorrow morning, so I will alert the General of the change of plans, though I’m sure she already knows--” 

“Oh, she _definitely_ already knows,” Finn said. Over-dramatic, as always. “Must’ve forgotten to update the log.”

“Do tell though, Master Finn, where are you going?” C3PO said. “I know you haven’t been to many parts of the galaxy because of your First Order upbringing--and nor have you, Mistress Rey, why, this must be an adventure--”

“Not that much!” Finn said a little too loudly, mouth stretching over the words almost comically. “Not an adventure at all, actually, just over to, you know…”

The clanging from up in the cabin quieted, as did the stomping from Jessika’s boots.Even without tapping into the Force, Rey knew the two of them were thinking the same thing-- _please, please stop talking._

“...not too far,” Finn continued, shrugging, shaking his head, “...like…”

Rey sneaked a look over her shoulder and Jessika had reappeared, wearing a look that Snap and Nien Nunb had both separately warned her foretold of a coming path of destruction, usually if someone had misplaced the novel she had nicked to read from the collective library. If Finn would turn around, the whole mess could be over--

“Just Da…”

_No_.

“...ntooine.”

C3PO took a hobbling step backwards in surprise, jerking his head between the two of them and then back at Jessika, who was already cursing up a storm in a language neither of them knew. “You’re going after Commander Dameron! The General explicitly forbade this, you’re going to get yourselves killed--” 

He bounced into a turn to hurry back into the base, already prattling loudly about _protocol_ and _the dangers of not listening to the General’s wisdom_ and Rey’s heart leapt straight up her throat to the back of her tongue, a choking panic to mirror that which had overtaken Finn’s face and Jessika’s vocabulary, and she saw her hand dart out before she realized it was moving.

It latched onto C3PO’s red wrist. “Threepio,” she said slowly. “Someone has to get Poe. We all know this. You don’t need to tell the General.”

The droid looked jerkily at the two of them in turn. “Mistress Rey, I do worry about Commander Dameron, but unfortunately I’m afraid I _must_ tell the General, she was simply adamant about this--”

He attempted to scoot away with Rey’s hand still tight around his arm; they were quickly running out of options before they even managed to leave the planet, and Poe was still out there in stars knew what sort of condition--

“I got a better idea.” Finn stepped forward and pushed C3PO face forward into the ground with a single smack on his back panels, and he shouted so loudly it managed to drown out the crunch of brass on concrete. 

“I won’t stand for this sort of abuse! I fought in the war too, you know--”

“Get his legs,” Finn hissed as he grabbed under C3PO’s shoulders. Despite the dense network of wires visible under his breastplate, he was surprisingly light, and they were able to shuffle into the cabin of the Falcon quickly enough to feel confident that no one had heard the commotion.

“I haven’t suffered such an indignity since Bespin, why did I think I was past this sort of cruelty-- _ahh!_ ” 

They dropped him on the floor of the cabin just beside the old holo-chess table and closed the entrance; and if Rey had thought Jessika looked livid before, it was nothing compared to the pure, unadulterated fury pouring off of her in waves.

“Oh no,” she whispered. “Oh no no no... we are _not_ bringing him along.”

“If we leave him here, we’re never even going to get to the Mid Rim,” Finn said, “because the General is going to shoot us out of the sky.”

A silence passed as the three of them stared at each other in a standoff--in a few seconds, it grew heavy enough that something snapped, and it was a physical piece of machinery under their feet that started hissing steam loudly enough to cover up the litany of new complaints pouring from C3PO’s mouth. 

Not loudly enough to cover up her own shouting at Finn and Jessika to throw her the tools to fix it as she pulled up the grate, jumping down and securing a couple new bolts in the place of those that had cracked from the pressure on the worn threads of the pipes.

“Flying this ship as far as you’re planning is asking for _certain_ death, Mistress Rey,” C3PO whined. “Of all the ways to go…” 

“Look,” she said, climbing back up from below and standing a few inches from Jessika’s flushed face. “If you want to get Poe, then we have to leave now and take Threepio with us.” 

Jessika’s jaw tensed, and Rey waited for some alarm, some muted shouting to erupt beyond the thick hull of the Falcon. Already waited too long, likely, and every second that passed was another second closer to the General pulling on her other shoe and stepping outside. Pulling them back to earth and leaving Poe to face whatever fate he had seemed to start stumbling toward.

“Well I, for one, am I casting my vote on taking Threepio along to Dantooine,” Finn said, leaning back slightly when Jessika gaze flared toward him like stray shots from a blaster. “In case anyone was wondering.” 

Finally Jessika threw her hands up, sighed, more tired than angry, and Rey couldn’t put her finger on where the shift had happened. Not that it mattered, and not that she had the luxury to dwell on it. “Good,” Rey nodded. “Now come on, I need a copilot for this hunk of metal.” 

She could hear Jessika’s footsteps behind her as she half-jogged to the cockpit, layered underneath by Finn’s shuffling to pull C3PO to his feet. The droid’s continued grumbling, that was easy to tune out for the moment as she put distance between them, especially with Finn talking right over him--but Jessika, even in her usual thick boots, hardly clunked against the metal underfoot. 

It was the quietest Rey had ever heard her--and seen her. The first full day after she and Master Luke had come back to D’Qar, the situation room was packed to capacity for a mission briefing, and amid the shouting match that had escalated between Snap and two of the analyst ensigns, one that had been garnering enough commentary from the rest of their ranks to drown out any attempt at clear thought, tight-lipped Jessika was the noisiest just by the way she held herself and moved around the crowd of men arguing over the day’s latest trivial matter. They’d made eye contact from across the room, Jessika had rolled her eyes and jerked her head over at the ballsiest ensign, and Rey’s ears began to ring. Only then, not before.

But now: Jessika silently slipped into the copilot chair and refused to look past the tips of her own fingers as they flipped the appropriate switches for take-off.

“I’m just worried about him is all.”

Rey pulled her hand back from the knob that would put them in the air. “I know.”

“Let’s get this damn ship into hyperspace already,” Jessika said, and she seemed to inflate back to her normal stature. “I don’t want to risk that shiny moof-milker having any bigger of a mouth than I already think he does.”

* * *

 

Having a hand digging through your brain wasn’t painful--no, Poe knew pain. He’d broken countless bones climbing and falling from the trees surrounding his house on Yavin 4, had parts of him sliced and punctured and ripped as his ship spiraled through the sky. Had enough puckered blaster burns along his edges to fashion out a couple constellations. But this: this was a pressure, an unrelenting pulse pushing out from behind his eyes while he was made acutely aware of parts of himself that had never had the nerve endings to feel. 

And there wasn’t any way to fight it. He could grind his teeth together, bite his tongue until it bled, but the information would still emerge pressed between Ren’s fingers. That he could feel, the extraction, a cold wisp of thought weaving its way through the wrinkles and he had screamed with the effort to keep it in. To hide it like he’d promised the General. And he had failed.

Ren’s figure loomed above him, maskless, and Poe’s stomach roiled watching the gloved hands twitch at his sides.

“I’m not going to kill you,” Ren said. “But as I said, there is unfinished business. The map to Skywalker was urgent and needed to be addressed--and then you escaped with that _traitor_ \--” 

“He has a name--”

“ _Quiet._ ” Ren’s tongue spat against the T and muted Poe’s voice, held his vocal cords still. “And then you escaped… there’s lots to dig through in your head, you know. The golden boy of the Resistance, the old golden boy of the Republic fleet--it’s all just gilded, isn’t it? Skin deep.”

Poe refused to let his gaze drop, as if that would convince Ren that a raw flood of adrenaline, fueled by fear and panic threaded with a thousand other things, was actually proof of his own courage.

“As a pilot, at least,” Ren continued. “Gold isn’t the most valuable currency out there. I’m sure you know that.” 

In one fluid motion, he stepped back and reached his hand forward, fingers stretching and jerking toward the spot between Poe’s eyes, and the pressure mounted. The fingers were inside his skull, massaging against his brain and ducking around corners. Peeking into shadowy alcoves that had gathered drifts of dust over the years, overlooked. Embarrassing childhood memories. Terrifying, nonsensical nightmares. And on and on and on. 

He was screaming again, but Ren hadn’t lifted his imposed silence. His mouth gaped open in vain.

But Ren must have found something worth stopping for--Poe’s vision flooded with it, he was suddenly there again, a D’Qar night thick with a recent rain, clouds drifting in and out with the wind as the stars came back out. He sat against the joint where the top half of the side of his ship’s wing met the cockpit, and Jessika was sidling up beside him double fisting two large urns of booze. “Gave Iolo some credits to pick me up some goodies on his last supply run,” she said. She didn’t elaborate where these concoctions had originated. They frothed up the inside curves of the urns, and the intermittent starlight shone through to reveal the brilliant colors.

“Y’know,” he said. “I remember all the liquor in my parents’ cabinet being brown.” 

“Yavin’s on the boring side of the Outer Rim,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I’m off tomorrow and you get to spend an entire three days on base before the General sends you on another stupid mission. Let’s drink.”

She hadn’t brought cups, and the urns were heavy, difficult to maneuver without splashing neon green splotches all over themselves and the wing--which had been freshly scrubbed down, too--and the solution was, so obvious to Jessika, that they had to drink more to make them lighter.

In the not-so-boring side of the Outer Rim, Poe would have been considered a lightweight.

(Why was Ren here? This was a happy memory, what could he exploit, there was nothing--)

“Your folks are still back on Yavin?” she asked, tapping against his arm. They had slid down so that they were lying on their backs, half-emptied urns at their hips, watching the stars spin around their pupils in new orbits. 

“My dad, yeah,” he said. He could feel her eyes on him. 

“What about your mom?”

“She… um. She died.” 

“Oh pfassk, Poe, I’m sorry.” 

He didn’t look over at her, but the glugging of liquid against the glass of the urn, followed by a splutter, was clear enough to indicate she had taken another clumsy swig. “You didn’t know. I’ve only been in the Resistance about a month and most of it hasn’t been here, anyway.” That line had come out of his mouth ten times in that month--to Snap and Ello and Iolo, Doctor Kalonia and every mechanic that stopped to chat with a wrench behind their ear. Kes Dameron and Shara Bey, minor Galactic Civil War legends, how were they doing, anyway? And then he’d have to tell them.

“What about you?” he asked with a cough. “Where--”

“‘Mfraid I’ve got about as cheerful of an answer as you, buddy.” Her voice fell flat, like she wanted to let the subject drop, but he lifted his urn and clinked it against hers. “What?” 

“To their memories,” he said. 

“You’re a sap.” But there wasn’t a single drop of sarcasm in her voice.

_How touching_ \--Ren’s voice grumbled over the scene while the memory of himself, of Jessika laid there in silence. The liquor was warming in the sticky air and bound to grow sour with it, but he could already sense the planet’s rotation beneath him, a comfort. Some things would never stop no matter how hard some days tried to dig their heels in.

“God,” Jessika groaned. “I haven’t been this toasted since--oh, this was right before you defected to us, lucky you. The entire squadron threw the General a Life Day party. Not me, mind you, but if they were supplying the booze, you bet I would show up and--gods, it was a _sight--_ ”

“Isn’t Life Day a Wookiee holiday?”

“Listen,” Jessika said, turning towards him and then pausing to shut her eyes and refocus. “Nien Nunb insisted, but he wouldn’t tell us why--”

The pressure in Poe’s head built to a new peak, threatening to leak a mix of blood and who knew what else down his nose before it ebbed back to its old levels. 

“--so there was a party. And even the General relaxed a little and danced once Ackbar dragged her out, and that one analyst--you know, she’s helped brief you a few times, Kaydel?-- _stars_ , she was more beautiful than anyone I’ve ever seen and I could have kissed her right… uh…” She brought the urn back to her mouth and took another swig, eyes refusing to leave Poe’s face. 

“You know, one time,” he blurted, and his hand reached out to her forearm, just above her wrist, to guide the urn back down to its spot beside his on the wing. He met her gaze as solidly as the alcohol would let him. “A few times, I guess, over the course of a week… I had a couple really graphic dreams about Admiral Statura.” And he waited, looking back at her through the dark; finally there was a bright spark of teeth as she snorted. “He has a great ass, all right?”

“Whatever you say--”

The cold hit him first as he was yanked back to the present. Head throbbing while the vestiges of intoxication seeped back into his memory and Ren stared at eye level inches from his face. “Gold or credits wouldn’t have gotten you very far there,” Ren said. A curl had stuck itself, matted, to Poe’s forehead and a leather finger pulled it free--it hung heavy from his hairline with the sweat. “No… the currency there--some would have said it was trust. You trusted her.” 

It had been trust. It had been. They trusted each other in the sky and they could trust each other when the wings of their ships were left loose in the dust clouds that blew in from the south, and some parts of the galaxy still had some catching up to do--but they were in another sector of it, just them in that moment. What else could that be but trust?

“It was fear.” Ren unfolded from his crouch, placed a casual hand on the restraints chafing into Poe’s wrists. “Fear was the motivator, and it can be a powerful one. You don’t like to think that fear is a part of your life, but it is. I’ve seen it.” 

His hand reached back towards Poe’s head, fingers extended like they were about to probe into his mind again--he winced, just slightly, and it brought a tight smirk to Ren’s face. “I never claimed I was fearless,” Poe said, vocal cords functioning once more. 

“You let your squadron think so. You let FN-2187 think so.” Ren closed the distance between Poe and his hand, but the touch was gentle, fingers curling loosely around his hair. “Your father, too, whenever you find time to call home. Now tell me… how did your mother die?” 

Poe’s teeth ground together and something in his chest pushed hot and tight against the constraints of his ribs, burning darker as Ren’s hand drifted lower to grip along his jawbone hard enough to leave a bruise. 

“War hero, wasn’t she?”

“Don’t you talk about her--” 

And Ren was back in his head, the sting of coppery blood filling his nose. “It must be difficult,” Ren said distantly as Poe’s vision began to splotch into black and fill with hazy patches of images he had long tried to keep from dwelling on. “Being the son of veterans and still having to fight their battles… and to do so as poorly as you have. Captured twice?” 

“Stop,” he choked, but the air was soupy and squeezing out his words. Ren’s face was fading back in, he could catch glimpses of his brow furrowing, the thin mouth pursed into a glower--then the pressure amped up again and the scene dipped into a nothingness darker than the void of space.

_How did she die, Poe Dameron?_

_Tell me how Shara Bey died._

He was warm. He knew his hands couldn’t stretch as far as he was used to but he tried anyway. The scent caught in his nose was somehow familiar and foreign at the same time, and he buried his face into it deeper.

“Poe, sweetie, I need to move my arm.” 

He shifted down the bed, tucked his face into her side as pulled her arm--his pillow--up and back over her chest. And he pushed himself back up to slot his chin over her bony shoulder, catching her staring at him when he finally opened his eyes. The sun streamed in through the skylight above the bed, the tips of the ruins visible just above the bottom sill.

“Remind me to tell your father that you need a haircut,” she laughed, even though his hair wasn’t that long. It _wasn’t._  

He wondered if she thought it was too long because one of her eyes was taped up. A thick pad of gauze sat under the tape and the edges of a sickly green bruise peeked out behind it--they had explained it to him, his father and the doctor, in simple terms. _We never knew that injury from the war was as bad as it was. We don’t know if we were too late to fix it._

(An older voice, his own, murmured in his head: blaster-shattered glass cutting into her face and eye, pushed through the body in an effort to expel it, pushed into the bloodstream instead. Sharp in the veins, headed straight for the heart.) 

Her breathing grew more shallow as the sun arced across the sky, and he suspected that they did know if they were too late to fix it but the thought of telling an eight-year-old--even though she’s said so many times, _eight, wow, you’re going to be a pilot before I know it._  

“Tell me the story about the pyramids,” he said, squirming until his too-long hair was nestled against her neck and his feet dangled off the side of the bed.

“Again?” She looked down at him with a grin.

“It’s my favorite.” 

(She never understood why he liked it so much, his father told him later, right before he left for the Republic Airfleet Academy. It wasn’t a happy story.) 

“Okay,” she whispered, leaning her head against his. “A long time ago, on this very moon, there lived a people who called themselves the Massassi--” 

(At sunset in the lull between finishing school in the nearby village and waiting for word on his application to the Academy, he would climb to the top of the nearest pyramid and watch the sky turn lavender as the sun sank beneath the jungle. Moss pushed up against his hands through the cracks of the millennia-old stone with weathered carvings along the ornate crowning. It wasn’t a language anyone spoke anymore, with tongues crushed under Sith boots right into the dirt he walked on every day.) 

And every time after she finished the story: “Did you and Pa fight the Sith too?” 

Her lips pressed softly to the top of his head, and her quiet words warmed him down to his toes. “Not exactly. More like their legacy.”

“And you won, right? You beat them?” 

“I like to think so.” 

_How cute that she was so wrong--_

And Poe was screaming, wrenched back to the ship and the cold restraints with the ghost of his mother’s touch still wisping around his head--Ren staggered, unbalanced, a wild shine in his eye. “Don’t talk about her--”

“The war never ended, she died for _nothing_ \--” 

“ _STOP._ ” 

Poe’s voice sounded unfamiliar in his ears, but he hardly had time for the fact to register before Ren was pushed flat on his back by an invisible extension of--himself? That was what it felt like, the borders of his body reaching past the skin, holding Ren down by a point in the center of his breastbone. And in his mind’s eye, he could see a smudge of Rey from an angle as if he were suddenly taller, her eyes defiant. An emotion rose in him, not his own, a mix of fear and curiosity and something else that was starting to feel like victory. 

And then it was over. Ren scrambled to his feet, breathing heavily, and Poe was left with himself. The anger that pulsed in his temples and boiled under his fingernails. 

“The Supreme Leader was right about you,” he gasped. A smile twitched on his lips, decided not to stay.

Poe watched as Ren slammed the door behind him, echoing in the now-silent chamber. But his heart, it wouldn’t slow, and sweat dripped down to the bridge of his nose, and he tried to push away the thoughts of the scene the morning after the one Ren yanked to the surface. Locked doors and starchy white sheets and a sudden hollow carved out at the center of his father. Staying under the shadow of the Force tree until his grandfather brought him in after dark and ignoring the wrinkled swelling under his eyes.

* * *

 

It took a total of two minutes for Finn to get himself kicked out of the cockpit.

As it turned out, the Han Solo School of Hyperspace was not the accredited institution he and Rey had come to believe--yes, Jessika had explained, you did have to punch in the coordinates of where you were trying to go, lest you accidentally crash into a planet, but there was so much more to it than that.

“I know it doesn’t always look that way,” she said, leaning into Rey’s space to slap a couple numbers into a complicated screen. “But the galaxy does have rules. Can you imagine if anyone and their astromech could jump to lightspeed whenever they kriffing well pleased? Chaos.” And when she had pointed out a diagram on the Falcon’s internal map--picking up the Corellian Run at Tatooine, veering off to the Hydian Way til an offshoot by Bandomeer--Finn had merely asked a question. A measly _question_. 

“That cuts through the Core Worlds--wouldn’t it be better to avoid that and go around it?” His finger laid on a section of the map labeled “Unknown Regions,” a gap between the galaxy core and a smattering of about five or six planets. 

“Did you not hear what I just said?” Jessika said tersely. 

And he may have argued.

C3PO was glad for the company, anyway. 

“Master Finn, please do excuse my saying so, but I’ve calculated the odds and--”

“Threepio, please--” 

“--the chances of finding Commander Dameron alive on Dantooine are less than eight thousand to one.” 

Finn reluctantly bit his tongue when the droid sounded sincerely distraught at the prospect, though the urge to push him out of the chair didn’t subside. The tense frustration coiling around his bones needed a breakthrough to release it, and the probabilities C3PO had been spouting since leaving the Ileenium system were only pulling it tighter. 

“What are the odds of finding him alive at all?” he asked.

“I’m afraid my processors are not capable of running all the necessary data points to expand the scenario to the entire galaxy.”

Figured. 

Finn eyed the holotable in the center of the room, the same one he’d accidentally elbowed on the first time on the ship; back on D’Qar, once Rey had returned with Luke, Chewbacca, and R2-D2 in tow, they had finally said what it was. Some form of chess, not that he’d seen any other type of the game before. Chewie explained the rules as Rey translated, and he was able to hold his own against her by the time--well, _now._ They’d only had a few weeks. 

The thought of challenging C3PO to a match crossed his mind, but he swatted the idea away. No doubt it would only make his current situation more insufferable. 

“I wasn’t even worried about him this time,” he said--out loud, which wasn’t the plan. No, the plan had been to sit in silence with the droid until Jessika and Rey felt like inviting him back up to the cockpit or they landed on Dantooine, whichever came first. But why would anything start going according to plan now? 

“About who, Master Finn?”

“Poe,” he sighed. “Every time they went out on a mission, I worried, okay? I worried. You know how he gets--” 

“Oh yes,” C3PO said. “Exceedingly reckless. And you know whom I have as comparison.” He shifted in his seat slightly, and Finn almost wished that his metal face had the ability to properly display facial expressions. 

“The one time I didn’t and--I didn’t even see him off.” 

He knew that the waves of anxiety he got would do nothing but swirl around inside himself; they wouldn’t hurtle through the stars and weave into the x-wing’s shields or warn Poe of a sneak TIE fighter attack. And then came the nagging thought, a whisper: _but what if it could?_

“Well, I--um,” C3PO said. “I’m certain he doesn’t begrudge you for it in the slightest.” His head turned away, just off to the left of where Finn was seated, and he didn’t press the issue further. Even without the wringing hands or squirming mouth, it was evident C3PO was at a loss for what to say and wanted to let the subject drop. 

Which was fine, really, especially if that meant hearing fewer statistics rattled off with increasingly pessimistic outlooks.

The thought he kept circling back to stood in the face of all the hard data sent churning through the droid’s brass skull--if anything was going to kill Poe Dameron, it wouldn’t be a simple recon errand to Dantooine. That was too simple for a man with a record like Poe, an anticlimactic puff into oblivion when, at the very least, he deserved to go out in a stream of exploding engines masquerading as fireworks. Enough so to confuse the residents of a nearby planet into thinking a star had gone supernova. 

(But truthfully, Finn thought, there wasn’t any end Poe could deserve. Maybe the Force sensed that. Maybe it could tell, and maybe it kept him alive at the other end of the galaxy.) 

“Grab your blaster!” Rey called from the cockpit. “Jessika says we’ll be landing in--” 

The Falcon jolted, tossing Finn and C3PO to the ground.

“Sorry!”--this time from Jessika. “The hyperdrive controls on this trash heap are ancient, damn--” 

In the commotion, the bag with his haphazardly packed gear had tumbled to the floor, the blaster sent skittling across the grates. He tucked it into the back of his pants, ignoring whatever comment C3PO had made thanking the Maker the safety was on, and sprinted back towards the cockpit. This time, Jessika didn’t tell him to _step back from her seat, so help her stars_ \--

She and Rey were shouting at each other as their hands flew across the various controls before them--as soon as one set of lights stopped blinking dangerously, another would start flashing, and with the sound of the engines roaring through the thickening atmosphere around them, their words melded seamlessly into the din, unintelligible.

And finally cutting through: “We’re coming in too fast for a landing and we can’t slow down!” Rey yelled over her shoulder. “The ship can’t crash land on ground this hard--”

“Wait wait wait--” He squeezed between their seats just as the Falcon broke through the cloudline--Dantooine spread out beneath them, a wide expanse of plains lined by a forest. And by the forest, at the foot of a hill, a charred stretch of grass and overlaid by hunks of metal. “I got this!” 

Finn yanked the controls from under Jessika’s fingers and sent the ship careening left, Rey tumbling into him and him smacking into Jessika, whose cursing storm was already halfway to a profanity typhoon. Stabilized, back level, and the Falcon was swooping down, the tips of the trees rising up to meet them, first in a light thwacking as the leaves skimmed the bottom of the hull and then in violent cracks. Thick branches flew across the windshield of the cockpit, dotted with metallic popping as bits of the hull were wrenched from where they were welded. 

“You call this _gotting it_?” Jessika shouted.

“I do, yeah!” He saw Rey drag a hand over her face from the corner of his eye. “Han landed the Falcon on the Starkiller base like this! Through the trees!” 

“ _Han Solo is not a role model!_ ” She lunged for the controls and Finn blocked her with his shoulder, holding his stance firm as her arms stretched and strained for a grip on something, _anything_. Or so Finn assumed; there was an unfamiliar air of desperation to her as she tried to scramble around him, and then Rey only started yelling louder. 

“At this point, fighting about it isn’t going to help!” The two steps she took from her seat to the controls, tense and laden with something that made her footfalls echo in the hollow of his chest.

He relinquished the controls quickly, and Jessika didn’t argue.

********** 

The Falcon had skidded and bounced to a stop an indeterminable distance into the forest, leaving a wide berth of trees demolished to splintered toothpicks in its wake. Every couple of minutes, another crack would echo past their line of site and a small cloud of native birds would flutter into the air to choose a perch further from the wreckage.

“At least we have a clear path back to the field,” Finn said. He threw a grin over his shoulder at Jessika and Rey and was met with blank stares.

“Yay,” Jessika deadpanned. 

“What are we going to do with…” Rey jerked her head back to the open hatch of the Falcon where C3PO had appeared with clanking footsteps. 

Finn almost felt sorry for him as Jessika and Rey immediately began to argue whether they should risk taking him and blowing their cover to potential First Order troops on the planet--or risk letting him stay at the ship and alert the General of their whereabouts. It wasn’t something that needed an extra voice in the mix, anyway; the two of them had it covered. 

Before them, the crushed trees formed a straight line until it cut sharply to the left, back out to the open plains and the gleaming wreckage Finn had spotted from the sky. _Poe was here, that was Poe’s ship_ \--but he shushed the hopeful hum with list he’d been culling since they landed. 

He could have been seeing things, mistaken a boulder or house for it. The downed ship could be old--a scrap junker from the days of the Old Republic or a casualty from the planet’s stint as a Rebel Alliance base. 

And the planet was large: smaller than D’Qar, reportedly, though not by much, and if what he spotted wasn’t Poe’s x-wing--his throat closed up, starting with a cold grip on his lungs and snaking upwards.

If they returned to the base empty handed, his bunk would be so quiet. 

“Enough staring into space, let’s go,” Jessika said, gripping his shoulder as she stepped past him. And while her voice tensed with the remnants of the spat, the glance she tossed his way was knowing. 

He rubbed his hands over his eyes, shook his head to loosen the vines of doubt that had started to creep there. And then Rey was beside him with a small smile and a gentle squeeze at his hand. 

“Thanks,” he sighed. 

“Don’t be thanking me just yet,” she said, and her smile grew into a lopsided grimace. “You and I have droid duty.”

Rey had won out, in the end--while C3PO had assured them time and time again that of _course_ he wouldn’t send a transmission back to D’Qar straight to General Organa’s personal inbox, the assurances were a tad too specific to make even Jessika comfortable to leave him. It didn’t mean she was happy, though, not by any means. 

“Compromise is always important,” Rey said, and Finn almost laughed as she tried to keep up a cheerful expression. 

The downed trees immediately surrounding where the Falcon had come to a skidding halt had formed a terrain that guaranteed slow going--thick trunks and the splintered remains of their stumps littered the ground and were just high enough to require a bit of climbing, something C3PO was not equipped to do in the least. Finn and Rey each locked an arm around his waist and carried him over the debris, hoisting him up whenever the logs were too large to straddle over.

“How much do you know about this place, Threepio?” Finn asked once they could spot the edge of the worst of the obstacle course, where Jessika was waiting impatiently. “You were in the first war, weren’t you?”

“I was indeed, Master Finn, but I’m afraid my affiliation with the Rebel Alliance began long after the Dantooine base was abandoned.” 

“Not to worry, though,” Rey said as she hopped up on the last trunk of substantial size. Finn hoisted C3PO up by his metal hips so she could grab his hands--thankfully, his bitter muttering had stopped about five minutes into the journey. “Jessika told me _quite_ a few times that she knows the planet’s geography like the engine of her x-wing.”

Her tone was off, a little too bright for the circumstances. “Has she been here before or something?” he asked. Rey offered him a hand up after she made sure C3PO was balanced on the other side, and while he could have managed without the extra lift, he took it anyway. “I didn’t think anyone outside of the General and Admiral Ackbar had.” 

“Oh no. No no no. She just took a lot of military history classes at the Academy--”

“Rey.” 

She sighed, motioned down at C3PO to wait a moment as he had started to shift his weight from foot to foot in that antsy way he had about him. “This isn’t how I thought this would go.” He watched her eyes trace a line from the Falcon to the shambled forest around them and then back at Jessika, who had plopped down on a small patch of grass and was picking at it idly. “I told you I had a plan, and now we have a wild card-- _two_ wild cards--and…”

“Is it something with Jessika herself? Because you two seemed to get along fine back at the base--” 

“No! No…” she said, half clearing her throat. “After you left the cockpit, I was very tense”--her hand ran across her breastbone--“and I tried Master Luke’s techniques to control your emotions and nothing was working and--I don’t know--her next to me was a constant reminder that things were already so far from what had been planned and we can’t leave him out there alone, Finn.” 

He opened his mouth to speak, but the words piled up in a jumble on the back of his tongue, his face flushing. There was a promise there-- _of course we’re going to get him, we are not going to abandon our own_ \--but it was weak, ready to shatter before the idea traveled down to his vocal cords.

Weeks before Rey and Skywalker finally came back to D’Qar, a risky mission had cropped up with some First Order battalions stationed in the Hutt territories, dividing the Resistance officers on whether they should intervene, because it was a lone First Order battalion on a planet in the Hutt territories, not even in anything that was close to the Republic’s jurisdiction, old or new, and it wasn’t worth getting caught in the skirmish. The General had stood taller than her physical frame in the situation room-- _these people have been quietly rebelling against the Hutts for years and they would do and have done the same for us. I promised them we would help._ Finn had stood behind her, stood behind Poe and Doctor Kalonia while Admiral Statura and stepped forward from the other side of the room and said, “The galaxy doesn’t take well to promises, General; it’s best not to make them.” 

“Finn?” 

He jumped as her hand touched his knee. “Sorry, I…” When he refocused his gaze, her eyes were scared and impatient. “This isn’t a Jakku.” 

Not a promise. A remark on the present, something that cannot change in the split second it’s observed. The opposite of a lie, though it still felt like one. 

********** 

“Where did you say you saw the wreckage again?”

On the ground, the field was far more expansive than he had anticipated; the small dips and curves in the land he’d spotted from above had morphed into hills blotting out the horizon. They weren’t tall enough, however, to shield them from the scorching sun now that they had stepped past the shade afforded by the trees left standing in the Falcon’s wake. 

Jessika shielded her eyes as she looked back at him, raising her eyebrows in lieu of asking again. 

“It was off to the right when we were flying in, so--” 

“To our left. Got it.”

The hill immediately before them was steeper than it appeared from a distance--despite the physical training regimen in the Resistance, all three of them were out of breath long before hitting the halfway mark. Pain sparked along the scar on Finn’s back from the effort, doubly so where muscles around his spine connected with his shoulders; droid duty had not ended simply because they were clear of the forest. 

“Artoo is going to be picking grass out of my circuits for days,” C3PO lamented as he and Rey dragged him up the slope by the arms. 

“Your little buddy is going to picking my shoe out of your mouth hole for the rest of your existence if you don’t shut the kriff up,” Jessika said. 

C3PO let out a little huff and Rey turned away before Finn could see her reaction. Undoubtedly she was rolling her eyes or jutting out her jaw--likely both--but his vision fizzled, the colorful fuzz dotting the muted dry greens of the planet while his back grew hot enough to burn through the jacket again. 

“Finn, are you all right?” Rey muttered. 

“Yeah, I’m--” He paused, seeing as she had dug her feet sideways into the cracked dirt to do the same. She didn’t look convinced in the slightest. “Okay,” he murmured, and he snuck a glance up at Jessika, stalled a few feet above them. “My back hurts a little, but it’s nothing--” 

“Threepio, are you sure you can’t make it up on your own?” she said suddenly.

“Mistress Rey, I assure you I cannot,” he said, “though if you don’t believe me, I would be more than willing to demonstrate how I would go tumbling back down to the bottom. I’m afraid I’m not built for such terrain like you are--excuse me?” 

Later, talking to Rey, Finn would want to describe how Jessika shifted back down the hill in a fluid motion, slick and sudden in the way she maneuvered to her looming stance over the droid--but he had seen fluid. Fluid was Rey twisting through a technical lightsaber exercise for the sixteenth time, the single arc Poe took on Takodana to shoot down half the enemy ships. This, with Jessika--it was more of a snap, an instant echo of C3PO’s words assuming physical form. 

Naturally, he and Rey stepped back.

“You have some nerve--” Jessika’s face screwed up in a tight frown while her finger jabbed at the rivets of C3PO’s nose. “Look. I know that you’re a protocol droid and that going after Poe is the opposite of protocol, but we need you to stop being an insufferable svaper because a man’s _life_ is at stake. Got it?”

Though he began to splutter out a response, she didn’t wait to hear what he would eventually put together, taking Finn’s spot at C3PO’s arm and jerking her head up the hill. 

Without C3PO’s added weight, the strain across his back had eased to a light sting at the deepest ruts of the scar tissue, the ridged bits of skin that already flared up with the weather. His legs were starting to burn from the climb, but it wasn’t anything that the First Order PT regimen hadn’t already put him through. 

“You don’t have to look at me like that,” Jessika said behind him, likely to Rey. “I’ve been with the Resistance and put up with this garbage a lot longer than you have.” 

“Oh--no,” Rey said. “It’s not--it’s not that. I was about to do the same thing, honestly.” 

The crest of the hill was growing nearer, and with it came a wider view of this small portion of the planet--the plains, covered in spurts of dry grasses; the greener forests along the edge that stretched on past the horizon. And to think the four of them could have been back on D’Qar finishing up breakfast with Poe elbowing his way between Snap and Iolo after grabbing seconds, and the night before, he could have laid on his bed facing the ceiling like he always did. Poe could have found the exact right words to capture this. The field and the trees. The dry earth and dust under the broiling sun. And Finn could have stared back up at his own part of the ceiling and seen it perfectly in his head under the comfort of his own blankets, knowing the promise of coming back together still hung between them, waiting to be fulfilled. 

Instead of this. Whatever this was panning out to be. 

“If it’s not that, then what is it?” Jessika said. 

“I’m just _stressed_.” 

“Looking at me stresses you out, huh?” Her voice indicated an obvious smirk, even if Finn couldn’t see it for himself.

“Wh--no! I--no,” Rey stuttered. “In general. I’m stressed in _general_ , Jessika. This is a stressful situation we’re in.”

“Well…” she sighed. “You’re not wrong.” She sounded tired, though Finn couldn’t hear any signs that indicated her breathing was labored or her muscles ached. “It’s a little less stressful now that this bucket of bolts has shut up.”

“Is he always like this?” 

“You have _no_ idea…”

While C3PO protested for a moment, he quickly fell silent again as Jessika recounted tale after tale of of the droid’s narrow escapes from being throttled by various members of the Resistance--never the General, she explained, who had long ago inured herself to it all. Currently, Snap and Admiral Ackbar were tied for the highest number of close calls. “Though Snap probably wins because we actually had to hold him back one time after Threepio said something about battle droids,” Jessika said as Rey laughed. “I mean, even Poe one time… um.” 

Finn had heard the story. Repairing an old Y-wing recovered from a battle before even the Dantooine base had been established. C3PO, constantly leaning over his shoulder, pointing out loose circuits on the switchboard and oil that was staining Poe’s pants, as if he hadn’t been aware. And he’d brought his wrench up a little quickly, gripped it a little too tightly, maybe hadn’t hidden the strained tendons in his neck like he’d thought. _But I’m not Snap,_ he’d told Finn. _It had been a long day. Lost one of the squadron on a mission the day before and… look, I like Threepio a lot but I didn’t want any company, you know?_ And Finn knew, had nodded even though Poe was turned away, attempting to fold his laundry. 

“Do you see anything up there?” Rey asked, and Finn looked down to find his feet on the crest of the hill.

The downed ship was right where he remembered it, and it was indeed a ship. An X-wing, even, with a smudge of color along the nose where Poe’s formation designation would be written in the galactic Aurebesh. 

“If we had to come all the way up this hill,” he said, “at least we were going in the right direction.” 

********** 

The X-wing was unsalvageable--or, as Rey quickly pointed out, _nearly_ unsalvageable. The entire electrical system had been fried to hell and back, the dashboard in the cockpit still reeking of burning metal and plastic, and the most crucial parts of the engines had suffered damages no amount of scrubbing or tinkering would fix.

“I just found what was left of the astromech,” C3PO said sadly. “Poor R6-B1. I think Artoo really liked that one.”

“Lucky BB-8 was in the shop,” Finn said.

Jessika groaned. “Stars, please don’t make me imagine that scenario. I don’t think I could stand the moping.” She halfheartedly kicked the underside of one of the wings and squinted out at the plains. “Okay, so: game plan. This is obviously his ship. And he’s…” 

She paused--it went unsaid. With no body, it would be safe to assume he didn’t die in the crash--but Jakku kept creeping up the back of Finn’s neck. Both of them had been thrown so far from the TIE fighter, and the idea that Poe could be in the nearby cluster of the forest or over the next hill, cold and a dull sheen to his eyes--it wouldn’t unperch from his shoulder. 

_But this isn’t Jakku_ , he reminded himself. _This isn’t sand. The marks on the ground would have led to him if he was thrown and didn’t make it, it’s okay, it’s okay--_

Rey’s hand brushed his elbow. “He’s alive. And that’s a good place to start.” 

Coughing, Jessika glanced at his elbow, Rey’s hand--kicked the wing again for good measure. “That it is. Y’know…” she said slowly. “He could have gone to the old base to see if he could establish contact on some of the old Rebel Alliance back channels. Kaydel’s been monitoring them lately.” She shrugged towards the plains ahead, thankfully towards a small valley between another two sizable hills. “Poe was headed in the right direction when things malfunctioned. We’re in the Burad Hills now… so…that way’s north. Right across the steppes and we’ll see the base by nightfall.” 

He’d been so close.

Absently he felt Rey squeeze at his arm before pulling away. Gathered her belongings in his peripheral vision as he kept staring down the line past where Jessika had pointed. The horizon distorted and stretched until he refocused his gaze elsewhere. Closer, by the broken blade of grass next to the toe of his shoe with the threads of it starting to peel apart. 

“Captain Pava,” C3PO said behind him, and then beside him, because he must have been moving--“I wasn’t aware that you and Lieutenant Connix were back on speaking terms--” 

“For a protocol droid, you have no sense of tact.”

“Pardon my saying so, but no one aside from Commander Dameron seemed to know why you weren’t speaking, and he refused to elaborate so if it was a sensitive matter there was no way for me to have known--” 

“What part,” Rey said slowly, “of ‘no sense of tact’ did you not understand?”

“Honestly. Thank you.”

Finn felt two hands clap him on each shoulder before Rey and Jessika’s frames appeared in his line of sight, unfocused and blurry, and he trudged ahead until their edges sharpened. They were talking quietly between themselves, softly enough that the frustrating huffing from C3PO behind him drowned it out; Rey had pulled from her bag a couple blackened pieces of the X-wing’s engine that she had pried from the wreck, pointing out a few things here and there to Jessika. When she had had the chance to salvage anything was beyond him, but then again, his head had been half elsewhere.

Maybe that was a sign of something, letting his mind wander on a mission, the vigilance slipping away without a frenzied moment of self-correction. Too many times after the mission on the Starkiller his shoulders had slouched or his thoughts had meandered to wondering about the next meal and something in his chest would seize, waiting for Captain Phasma to cast a shadow over his shoulder. The cold grip never came--just a deeper wash through his chest of something he couldn’t yet identify.

There was a sense of being untethered as their journey continued: the Rielig Steppes, as Jessika identified them, were a flatter expanse of land than anything Finn had ever seen, a dry and dusty olive swathe breaking off at the skyline in every direction he turned. They were the only figures rising above the grass. No herds of native fauna. No signs of intelligent species. The four of them trekked further into the field and away from where the Falcon had crashed, and the entire scene--the nothingness, the blank of the blue sky above them, cloudless and bright--was too reminiscent of space for it not to draw his thoughts back to Poe. The Resistance. The First Order. Their ships hovering in the blank black between the stars. Finn was no longer a stormtrooper yet so new of a rebel, decommissioned from one and not completely accustomed to the other. Were it not for Dantooine’s gravity, he feared he would float away. 

“Did BB-8 really zap you on Jakku?”

It was Jessika. Her cheeks were flushed from the sun and her eyes were crinkling at the corners and she was still walking ahead without looking there. Beside her, Rey had her hand clutched over her face, turned away, shoulders shaking the way they did when she was holding in a laugh.

“Well… yeah,” Finn said. “But only because they thought I stole Poe’s jacket.” 

Jessika’s smirk crawled further up her cheek, lopsided as her eyes traced how the same jacket draped his frame now. “Didn’t you, though?” 

“No, Jess,” Rey snorted. _Jess_. That was new. “He _gave_ it to him!” 

“I mean, he did,” Finn said. “Later. Not then.” 

Apparently satisfied, they turned back to each other, voices low again--or, maybe not low, but not projected to include anyone but themselves. He didn’t mind. He liked seeing the two of them toeing closer to something like happiness when its opposite was ready to chomp down on their heels. 

The sun arced through the sky as they pressed onwards, dipping down below the horizon and illuminating the silhouette of a craggy structure, a small bump against the flat expanse of the steppes. A sign, Jessika said--that was a sign. The base had been situated near the remains of an old Jedi temple. 

Rey held her breath, wide eyes belying her efforts to conceal whatever she was feeling as she met each of their gazes. The tiniest of grins inched across her face when she turned back ahead.

Just as Jessika had predicted, the sky was just starting to darken when they came across the prefab base, the paint peeling into rust as the grass pushed up through the short stairs to the only door they could find. Finn flicked on a glowrod--the sun had fallen behind a tall, weathered concrete slab that still stood tall beside the crumbling remains of the temple, and its shadows were long, deeper than he felt they should be.

Rey’s gaze crawled up to the tip of it as Jessika stood cemented in place, C3PO nearly bumping into her.

“Something doesn’t feel right,” she said. 

“It definitely feels different,” Rey murmured.

“Of course it would to you. I’m not Force-sensitive.” Jessika side-eyed C3PO and took a step to put some distance between them. “I’m talking about something else.”

Finn made his way up the steps alone, trying to ignore the sharp tug at his gut that Jessika must have been referring to. There should have been some sign of disturbance if Poe had made it to the base to complete the mission and call for help, but the stalks of grass remained unbroken and the dust that had settled on the steps bore no footprint save his own. 

“Poe?” He shined the glowrod at the lone circular window in the door, the glass a grimy near-oblique shade of black. “We came to get you.”

Nothing.

The muck was caked on the window thick, and no amount of spit and rubbing with the hem of his long-sleeve shirt was going to return it to its original condition. Grit stuck to the sleeve and the window was left with the dirt streaked into new swirling patterns.

“Poe!” He tried the door--the handle wouldn’t turn, and despite his pulling it there were no signs that it was budging from the frame. “C’mon,” he sighed quietly. “I know you’re a heavy sleeper but this is ridiculous--” 

“Finn…” 

“I mean.” He turned around, heard himself laugh though the feeling of it slowly shredded across his lungs, air escaping, and maybe he shouldn’t waste his breath on laughing when it was suddenly becoming more difficult to breathe. “I know you’ve known him longer than me, Jessika, but you don’t have to share a room with him. Seven alarms and he’ll sleep through all of them--” 

Tried the door again. This time a few flakes of rust fluttered down to his feet. 

“I don’t get it,” he said under his breath. 

“Finn, he’s not here.” Jessika’s voice cracked and the last bit of breath he’d been clinging to, an invisible foot punted it out of his chest. “Clearly no one has been here since the war.”

“Well--” His breathing was coming in gasps, but nothing seemed to stick in his lungs, like that foot had cracked a hole and everything was leaking out. “We should still--I mean--”

Then Rey was beside him, gently shifting him a few steps away from the door. Quiet but forceful, a hand already at the lightsaber strapped to her hip. “If he didn’t get here, that means the data the General wants still hasn’t been retrieved.”

He watched her hands--thin fingers clasping around the hilt of the saber, another fist squeezing his lungs--“Wait, _wait_ …” And he tried to catch his breath, control how much his chest was heaving as she found his gaze and glanced back at Jessika. “It’ll go right through the door… what if… I mean, on the off chance--” 

“No, you’re right,” she said. The saber slipped back into its strap and she studied the door intently, brow knitting together. “It’s a last resort. Maybe I can…” And she stuck her hand back out, the bones along its back straining against the skin as her fingers bent and froze until the door cracked against its seal. “Never tried that before,” she said to herself, and she shot him a small grin that he felt help his heart slow. 

More rust flakes fell down at their feet as the door groaned open--not because it looked heavy against Rey’s arms, but likely due to disuse. 

“Goodness,” she coughed upon stepping inside. Finn peeked after her and found her frame dwarfed by boxes in a cloud of dust illuminated in the fading light. “Most of this looks like old blaster storage… all empty… we got anything to pull the data from these old hard drives?”

“All right, it’s your time to shine, buddy.” Jessika hoisted C3PO into his arms, sending him stumbling back against the wall of the base. “Sorry,” she said as she jumped up and pushed the droid inside. “If I had given him any more warning I think he would have tried to make a break for it.”

And while C3PO certainly did protest, he did so under his breath, just loud enough for Rey to catch wind and push her mouth into a tight line. They started at booting up the decades-old system, brushing off the screens and searching for data ports--occasionally swatting away each other’s hands. 

Jessika looked away from their squabbling to give him a once over before turning back. “I’ve never seen anyone use the Force before,” she said quietly. “I mean, you hear about it. You know what it’s supposed to be and all that, but…” From inside the base, Rey groaned and ran a hand over her face, trying desperately to talk over whatever C3PO was going on about this time--and Jessika’s face pulled into the brightest grin he had seen her wear in the months since joining the Resistance. 

It fell back into her normal expression as soon as she caught him looking. “Anyway,” she coughed. “Are you doing okay? We’re going to find him,” she added hurriedly before he could respond. Almost as if she were trying to convince herself as well as him. “He’s resourceful. Honestly,” she sighed, “I’d bet you my weekly share of caf that he’s found another way to broadcast on our back channels. We’ll check as soon as we’re clear of this place, okay?” 

He nodded, and she kept talking to fill the silence--tidbits here and there about why the Rebel Alliance had picked Dantooine as a strategic outpost--but her words garbled into mush before he had a chance to decipher them.

* * *

 

Home had two seasons, hot and hell, and before the air turned to soup in hell season, right before the solstice, he would climb to the highest branch on the Force tree that could support his weight, back against the warm trunk, and watch the lavender sky sink into darkness through the golden leaves. As the years passed, that branch was lower and lower down--but Poe looked down at his hands, his legs draped over the bark, and the oil staining his palms and orange flight suit were unmistakable, as were the scars lining the first two fingers on his left hand. (One short and thick, an electrical burn from his ship at the Academy; the other thin, running along the inside edge, still a deep red even after surviving adolescence.)

He hadn’t been this high in the tree since his eighth birthday. The limb hadn’t grown thicker; it was still a supple, spindly thing, the perfect size for little hands to grab onto as a walking stick once it snapped and fell to the ground. But his body had gathered the layered rings of age that hadn’t bothered to wrap around this part of the tree. 

The thought settled into his chest. It rattled against his ribs. Skittered to a heavy silence that only sank deeper and collected sweat at his brow.

The hell season was definitely coming.

“Poe.” 

And there his mother was, standing at the base and teasing a shining leaf between her thumb and first finger like she always did when she came to fetch him for dinner. No gray lined her hair--she was his age, calling up to him like he was a child, and it was suddenly impossible to swallow past the lump in his throat. 

“Did Luke ever talk to you about this? This tree?” 

He blinked and she was kneeling on the branch beside him, her entire weight on a branch no thicker than the one he himself was perched on, yet it didn’t even begin to bend. 

The sun was setting. Lavender shifting to a dark purple shade by shade. 

“No,” he said. “He’s never… he’s never brought it up.” 

Her face was so close. Familiar in his memory and so strange to be present and whole this close to his again. He was overly conscious of the stubble lining his jaw, of each hair pushing through his skin. The lines etched at the corners of his eyes and mouth. The new scars. The child she had known was buried under so much but she still reached out, cupped his cheek with her hand and rubbed just along the ridge of his cheekbone.

Her hand was warm, just like the spine of the tree against his back. He leaned into it, weighted by the heaviness in his chest and coiling around his heart.

“Sweetheart, look at me.”

And he did. The scar cutting through her eyebrow was darker in the setting sun but her eyes glowed a bright mahogany and it was the same sight he had seen every morning when she came to sit on the edge of his bed with promises of his father’s breakfast in the kitchen.

(It wasn’t real but he wanted it to be. In that moment, when he could convince most of himself that it _was_ real, he wanted it more than he had wanted anything before in his life.) 

“I’m so proud of you.”

Over her shoulder, he could see their house: tilted on its side, engulfed in flames as black and violet as the sky was becoming above them. 

********** 

“Captain didn’t tell me I was getting a roommate.”

Poe pulled his eyes open, and before he even tried to move, he could feel the sharp twinges of a crick in his neck and a sore shoulder from the position he had been sleeping in. (Not sleeping. Knocked out. How long had it been since he was locked up in the interrogation room with Kylo Ren? He couldn’t remember, just shackled then suddenly here on a bare, paper-thin cot--) 

He sat up and tried not to wince but he must have anyway; the stormtrooper standing next to the cot on the opposite side of the small room made a _tsk_ noise under his breath.

“I don’t think I’m your _roommate_ ,” Poe said.

“Obviously.”

He removed his helmet, and Poe didn’t know what he was expecting but it wasn’t this: skin so pale it glowed, a stark contrast to the red hair mussed by sweat. His face looked incomplete, somehow, as if whoever had sat down to design him before his birth had been called away before they had finished and never returned. The stormtrooper eyed him warily before setting the helmet on the table at the head of the cot and removing the rest of his gear. 

“I’ve been given the honor of keeping track of you over the next few days,” he said. Poe couldn’t tell whether he was being sarcastic or not. “Captain just didn’t tell me that you’d be sharing my bunk, too.”

His back was turned to Poe as he stripped off the top half of the black body glove--along his right shoulder was the unmistakable pink scar from a high-powered blaster. Its hue appeared so angry next to the paper white of his skin, and only then did Poe realize that he looked unfinished because he wasn’t dotted with freckles as every other redhead he’d met had been. This was skin that had never seen the sun.

“What’s your name?”

The stormtrooper looked back over his shoulder and pulled on a plain t-shirt. “My designation is FN-2199. Everyone else in this corps calls me Nines, so don’t.”

Nines.

Poe knew that name.

“And we all know who you are,” Nines continued, flopping down on the cot. “The Resistance scum broken out by-- _him._ ” He opened his mouth to say something more, but it collapsed into a thin line as he glared back up at the ceiling. Undoubtedly Nines had a lot to say to him, and Poe almost admired him for the restraint it took to keep it inside.

It was a quality he knew didn’t come naturally for himself, so he bit his tongue and laid back against the wall, eyeing the ceiling. The General would have been proud, him listening to this often-repeated plea for once--the look she had given him after hearing how he’d mouthed off at Kylo Ren on Jakku had almost made him regret it.

Across the room, Nines had fallen into an easy breathing, slow and even, hardly paying him any mind. Like he knew Poe wouldn’t try to escape. Maybe he knew that it was impossible, the doors locking behind him to keep them both inside or extra guards staged in the hall. Or he had simply inferred enough from Poe, how he had fled with Finn the first time, to know there wasn’t anything to fear.

In battle, locked into his X-wing up in the sky, that was one thing--shooting down TIE fighters piloted by the jet-black stormtroopers was a matter of survival, his own and his squadron’s; it wasn’t something he had the luxury of time to think about in the moment. Returning to D’Qar, he would replay the battle in his head and count the number of ships he’d shot down, take a moment to acknowledge the lives he’d been forced to end because of the war. Because of circumstances within the war. He took even more time to reflect on each ship after Finn came into his life.

Poe supposed it would be easy to jump Nines. Incapacitate him, make a break for the hangar and hijack another TIE fighter to fly back to base. The plan began to formulate in his head, the best way to go about it, but the image warped in his head whenever he would look down and see his hands connecting with Nines’ face or throat, the pale skin flashing to a specific shade of brown he had come to recognize as something close to home. And at once the plan fizzled into nothing.

“What do they want with me?” he asked.

Nines sighed. “That’s above my clearance level. But,” he said, meeting Poe’s gaze. “If I were General Hux, I would use you as bait. Make an example of Eighty-Seven to show the rest of us what happens when you commit treason.”

“Why do you think he would come for me again?” he asked slowly. He knew why--because he was Finn, because he’d threatened to do so over the comms once when Black Squadron had gotten into a nasty pocket of TIE fighters and things had started to go south, and even after Tabala had pushed him out of her station he could still hear him in the background. Repeating himself.

But how was the First Order supposed to know that? How was Nines?

“Eighty-Seven formed attachments,” Nines said. “It’s been his weakness since the beginning.”

_I wouldn’t call it that at all_ , he almost replied. His molars dug down harder into his tongue, right to the point of bruising.

“Plus,” Nines continued, “we all heard Kylo Ren slice half the kitchens apart when Hux told him they’d traced the Millennium Falcon taking hyperspace lanes towards wherever they picked you up.”

The lights in the room clicked off-- it must have been whatever qualified as nighttime on this ship--and within minutes soft snoring grumbled from Nines’ cot. Poe squeezed his eyes shut until dots of color burst into the black of his vision, reaching out tentatively with a shaky grip on the tense burn at the core of his chest that hadn’t abated since his encounter with Ren. It broiled with the same rhythm as the anxiety that would flare up in the wake of close calls, but this was different. This was new. This was the source of the invisible hand that had thrown Ren off his feet, and Poe knew what he ought to call it, but he hesitated.

But still he reached, tried to feel past the walls confining him with Nines and into the galaxy at large--to find Finn or, at the very least, clutch onto Rey. Because she would know if he were on the Falcon. She would feel his fear and tell him to come home.

********** 

By the time the lights clicked back on, Poe’s eyes stung from fatigue with every blink; whether or not he ever actually fell asleep was uncertain as the night seemed to drag on forever, hazy and gray. Nines hopped up almost at once and reassembled himself in his armor and helmet by the time Poe had rubbed half the sleep from his eyes. And by then, Nines had already slapped cuffs around his wrists.

“Up,” he said. His voice had taken on the filtered electronic quality the helmets were prone to supply, and when Poe didn’t move immediately, he kicked his foot. “We have to pick up morning rations, and then I’m dropping you off with the Captain.”

In the hallway outside their room, a steady stream of stormtroopers were marching around the corner to their left. It was early--it had to be--yet not one of them displayed any signs of grogginess like he was accustomed to seeing in the caf line on D’Qar. The butt of Nines’ blaster dug into his back and they slipped into the line where there was a small gap.

“How was it bunking with the enemy?” someone behind Nines asked with a laugh.

“Shut it, Zeroes. You know how important this is to the Order.”

Zeroes--he knew that name, too. “Oh, we had a _fantastic_ night,” he said before he could stop himself. So much for listening to the General. “He’s a great little spoon--”

A searing pain slashed across the back of his skull and he found himself on his knees, leaning against his forearms, back to biting his tongue to keep back the stream of curse  words that he suspected would only bring more pain. But still there was a satisfaction in getting to them so easily, knowing that aspects of his very existence was a form of rebellion within these ranks. Nines had a nice face--in another life, he would have paid him a second or third glance at the cantina.

But it was this life, and Nines’ face was hidden behind the uniform sickly grin of the helmet and his hands gripped his blaster like he was more than ready to knock a few of his teeth out to keep him down.

A foot hit his hip and he scrambled back to his feet, and the quiet snickering behind them kept on while Nines kept the blaster nestled close in the small of his back. The fear that had washed so strongly over him the night before had ebbed to a low, ignorable pulse at his core, circling that warmth he refused to name.

“Captain’s got a lot worse waiting for you than a blaster to the head if you’re insolent with her,” Nines hissed in his ear.

And the first thing to come to Poe’s mind was: _Excellent, looking forward to it._

Stars, as if he weren’t right on the path to proving the General and the Admirals right. He’d overheard them murmuring among each other in the situation room late one night--the blue squadron had come back with a few pilots smaller from the Vivenda Sector mission, the black with a couple fried astromechs, and the air around the base hung on everyone’s shoulders like the thick moss draped over Yavin 4’s trees. Dedicated to a fault, that was what the General had said. Ackbar and Statura hadn’t understood.

_But it’s one thing to be dedicated and another completely to revel in the consequences it brings you personally--_ so he had come back to their bunk with a shiner so swollen it was pushing his eye shut and a cracking blaster burn on the back of his calf. He wasn’t dead, and he finished the mission and got in a couple barbs to the First Order officers stationed on Dorvalla.

_That’s when I got this_ , he’d grinned, pointing to the black eye, and Finn had said what he said. Repeated it, even, when he’d squeezed the bacta gel onto the burn and Poe’s wince had looked more like a grin.

_Refusing to even go to the medbay… what’s wrong with you, Poe Dameron?_

Good question.

The morning rations were a single hard protein bar, a nauseating grayish-brown with the kind of texture Poe had come to associate with the freeze-dried sides on base before the cooks had added the water. It sapped all the moisture from his mouth immediately, but he forced it down as Nines pushed him down another hallway off the cafeteria. The cuffs were making it difficult to unwrap the very bottom, and though he wasn’t eager to choke down another mouthful, he didn’t have a clear idea of when his next meal would be.

Eventually they came to a small room tucked away in the corner of the hall before it curved back towards what Poe guessed was the nose of the ship. It was sparsely furnished, with only a lone plastic chair and a table pushed up against the wall equipped with a one-way mirror. Beyond that, into the room next door, sat four stormtroopers--each sitting in a plastic chair similar to the one Poe found himself being forced into, their helmets removed.

Nines removed his cuffs and replaced them with a set of durasteel restraints on the arms of the chair similar to the ones that had held him in the interrogation room the day before. The added girth of the chair arms made their hold on Poe’s wrists just too tight, and it was already starting to cut into his skin.

“Who are they?”

“Always with the questions,” Nines muttered. “Members of the FQ corps that were determined to need some reconditioning. Never used to be more than one at a time, you know, and not this frequently. Another thing to thank Eighty-Seven for.”

“You seem to put a lot of the blame on him instead of me,” Poe said. Nines had just stepped towards the door and turned back around, finger idling near the trigger of the blaster. “He wouldn’t have been able to get out if I hadn’t helped him.”

(A little lie was okay when goading the enemy, he had often told himself--they didn’t have to know the gritty details of his every thought.)

“You were the vehicle of his escape, but you didn’t make him defect.”

“It was personal, wasn’t it?” He let a smirk slide onto his face, watching as Nines’ hands tensed.

“I never liked FN-2187. None of us did much,” he spat. “But this--” He pointed to the room beyond the mirror. “--this is what he’s done. What you helped him do. But he did it. I don’t care that it was him--I care that it’s happening at _all_.”

The door slammed behind him with a clang, leaving Poe only with the low hum of the ship’s climate control and whatever huffs penetrated the thick walls from the room on the other side of the mirror. The four stormtroopers weren’t strapped to their chairs like he was, though they weren’t prisoners, not in the same way--but their faces were young, and even in the small sample the range of origins stretched across the entire galaxy. Stolen from their families as infants, mourned, presumed dead. If there was anyone left alive to mourn them at all after the kidnapping.

Finn never spoke about that part, and Poe never pressed the matter. He imagined that he brought it up more with Rey if he did at all; that river between them ran deep with their mutual lack of answers. But this, this room Poe could see now--Finn had spoken about this, however briefly. How they had brought him in for reconditioning. (How it must not have worked very well, because he was sitting with Poe on the floor of their bunk, facing each other, backs up against the sides of their beds--in the Resistance base, far from the fleets of star destroyers as the clock ticked further and further from the hour of lights out, and Finn was letting his foot lightly smack against Poe’s ankle whenever he found something he said particularly ridiculous.)

Poe blinked and each of the stormtroopers in front of him turned into Finn.

He blinked again and the scene shifted back to what it really was.

The door in the corner of the other room swung out heavily with a low metallic groan, quickly closing behind the figure who stepped inside. Phasma, the captain who loomed a solid foot over most of her compatriots, gifted with the chrome armor never before seen in any of the surviving records from the Empire or Clone Wars. At the base, day-to-day, Finn would name-drop her in stories, an omnipresent shadow in every significant memory from his time in the First Order he had decided to share. But he never addressed her directly: it curved around the side, following the warped reflection in her breastplate, so when she creeped up in his nightmares she would stand before him in piecemeal. Not the image of her, because Poe had seen that for himself on Jakku--but the essence, light shone through the gaps, throwing the generic face of the helmet into a haunting relief.

He understood it now. Her head turned towards her side of the mirror, right where his chair had been stationed. She couldn’t see through the mirror but the imagined path of her eyes under the black strip of the helmet pressed a heavy weight onto his chest.

“FQ-1602, FQ-1689, FQ-1657, FQ-0222.” The voice came from the corner of Poe’s room, piped in from the other side and into a speaker tucked just under the ceiling paneling. Staccato and direct, just like the commands of the air fleet he had trained with at the Academy. “You should know why you are here today. But in case you forgot: the four of you were caught discussing matters at odds with the mission and values of the First Order. Without a unified front behind these ideals, there is no path to victory in the galaxy.” She clanked to the far wall and pressed a button, dimming the lights and bringing up a large holovid before them. “You have been excused from your duties today for this session. I will return before evening rations so that you may return to your bunks.”

Phasma’s cape flashed behind her as she exited, but Poe hardly paid it any attention--the holovid had begun to project a series of images that he recognized not only from military history at the Academy, but from around his home on Yavin 4--the first drafts of the Rebel Alliance emblem, snow-covered AT-ATs, the Death Star incinerating in a novalike burst. And the sequence moved through history in a melange, zooming in on particular events as the grainy music swelled. The destruction of the second Death Star and the liberation of Naboo. Establishing the New Republic. Pushing the remnants of the Empire to patches along the Outer Rim.

“Your fellow escapee left behind quite a mess.”

Poe jumped in his seat and turned to the source of the voice, finding the head of a blaster tucked next to his ear; Phasma loomed behind him, cast him in shadow. _I didn’t even hear you open the door_ \--it sat on his tongue and didn’t dare to move.

“Cases like this are easy,” she said. “We catch a group of them muttering together about the rumor surrounding that one cadet from the FN corps. The next week there’s a smaller group whispering that maybe they’re on the wrong side of this war--it doesn’t take long to spot. And they just need some reminders about our history. Repeat offenders need a little more tough love, but this tends to suffice.”

Beyond the mirror, Finn’s face took up half the holovid’s projection, and a whole block of stormtrooper helmets with their designations took up the other--“FN-2187 betrayed the First Order, delivered a key prisoner and intelligence back to the Resistance, and killed your brothers in arms listed before you. Because of his actions, the New Republic has been allowed to regroup after our victory in the Hosnian System and continue their oppressive machinations to control the galaxy.”

_They fear you, Finn_. A bubble of pride rose in his chest, and he wanted to reach back through the months to when Finn first was cleared to leave the med bay, when he fell back on his new bed and his eyes glossed over, staring at nothing. ( _“They want me to join the Resistance for real? But I’m just a--”_ And he’d stopped, a grin flopping onto his face. Wondered why Poe was looking at him like that. _“You’re not ‘just’ an anything, buddy_ , _”_ he’d told him.)

(The First Order could get one thing right, at least.)

But the bubble burst as the holovid progressed. His own face soon replaced Finn’s. Then Han’s. The General’s. Admiral Ackbar and Nien Nunb and a grainy image of a young, beardless Luke Skywalker. Each of them had their own visual for body counts, and the stormtroopers squirmed as the numbers crawled higher, the battles between the Rebel Alliance and Empire described in vivid detail with close focus on the supposed treachery of the rebels. The print was too fine to read from a distance--Poe couldn’t tell if the numbers were fabricated.

_How would you know? Do you keep a tally? Do any of them?_

“The First Order,” the holovid continued, “is the legacy of an ancient fraternity who toiled for thousands of years against the crimes of the Old Republic and the Jedi. But it wasn’t until a martyr of the Empire, Lord Vader, struck back against the Jedi that the Old Republic would finally fall and justice could be restored--”

“Are you…” He couldn’t breathe. The air in his lungs seethed hot and scalding and scorched up his throat and his vocal cords couldn’t handle the strain to speak.

“Am I what?” Phasma said. “Spit it out.”

Everything was pushing to come out at once, elbowing to the front, and had his fingernails not been bitten to nubs they would have started to dig into his palm. Broken the skin and tried to keep going.

The holovid kept going but the images went blurry, the stormtroopers melted, the voiceover distorted--the heat at the center of him was spreading outwards and seeping from his skin without the familiar damp drip along his hairline.

“When Vader attacked the Jedi,” he finally said, voice shaking, “they say he attacked children. And you’re telling them to treat him like a kriffing _hero_ \--”

“Those children had been taken from their homes to be indoctrinated by the Jedi, who were no more than the puppet strong-arm of the Old Republic--”

“What about yourselves, then?” His throat tightened around his words, and even with the force behind them, they came out in a rasp rather than the shout he had been aiming for: the push of his tongue behind the noise, a hope that it would knock against the shiny chrome of her helmet and leave something to ring in her ears. “What about them? What about _Finn_? You call the Jedi kidnappers when you have an army eons bigger than they ever did, and from children you stole--”

“Saving them from a life under the boot of the New Republic--”

“Because yours is so much better.” And he almost had to laugh. Almost, but the cold waves rolling down his limbs kept the need at bay.

The holovid switched to an image of an asteroid field beside the face of Bail Organa, and he couldn’t look. He pushed the ringing in his ears louder to cover up the voiceover, because wouldn’t it be disrespectful to the General to hear the slander about the man who raised her when she never let his name slip herself? 

“You should ask FN-2187,” Phasma said. “Not about the boots. See what he says about Alderaan and the Emperor or anything else he hasn’t told you. You might be surprised.”

The four stormtroopers flashed into Finn’s face again, their wide eyes of horror and disgust at the supposed crimes of the Rebel Alliance drawn into the face he’d watched sleeping when the insomnia shook at his shoulders. Bile scraped the back of his throat, kept scraping higher and higher. _You don’t know the half of what he lived through or what any of them lived through and this is just a sliver of it and it’s already turned your blood to steam in your veins--_

The tip of Phasma’s blaster dug further into his neck and pulled along the skin--she was stepping slowly around his chair to place herself between him and the one-way mirror, each step deliberate and shrilly reverberating as metal came down on the grated floors. “He had all the makings to be General Hux’s right hand man one day,” she murmured. The blaster traced up his jaw and towards his hairline, pulling away a curl that had dropped into his eyes. “Until Jakku, of course.”

Were his hands not strapped down, Poe would have made to reach up and pull the helmet off her head. Her eyes, he needed to stare into the pinpricks her pupils would be curling into under the buzzing lights, see the twitch of the muscles at the corners when he said what was building at the back of his teeth.

Instead he leaned his head forward, digging the thin skin at his hairline into the barrel. “I don’t think you knew him as well as you think you did.”

With a swift jab of the blaster, she pushed him back against the seat, turned on her heel with an awful metallic screech. Slammed the door behind her to leave him to watch the rest of the smear campaign they called reeducation.

Nines came back however many hours later, found Poe’s hands clutched around the end of the chair’s arms so tightly that they had started to shake. Skin hot, breathing hard and deliberately. Silent while Nines stripped him of the restraints and led him once again with a blaster barrel burying itself into the notches of his spine.

Back to the bunk: another ration bar laid on his cot but the thought of food churned something bright in his stomach all the way up past his lungs.

**********

His hands were small as an eight-year-old, even for a child of his age, and they felt even smaller dwarfed in the tight grips of his father and grandfather. One on each hand, standing with backs unnaturally straight, at least an inch taller than what he was used to--he could feel the angle bent further in his neck as he tried to catch their eye, either one of them. They were the only two at the small ceremony that he knew and the whisper birds were echoing all the questions sitting at the tip of his tongue, the ones he couldn’t make himself vocalize. Not now. Not when the thickness of the heat was starting to ebb, releasing the pressure on their throats. The silence needed to be kept for a little while longer.

He tried to peek around his grandfather’s back to the other two in attendance. They had greeted him warmly, though he never remembered meeting them--he felt like he would have been able to find them in his memory if he had. The long brown cloak and the one glove on the man’s right hand. The elaborate hairstyle and set of the woman’s shoulders. The way both of their eyes were drawn to the tips of the Force tree reaching high over the roof of the house.

He’d been here before: the first time, and then the mirrors after that. The mirages behind the back of his eyeballs that crept their way to the front when the night was at its deepest.

The flames of the funeral pyre were how it how it ended in the copies. Yellows and oranges spat up towards the sky with sparks fizzling slower behind them as the young wood of the forest popped in the heat. His gaze lingered on the pyre in this iteration longer than usual and without the urge to yank himself away and back into the quiet of the present.

The flames were black.

* * *

 

By the time they had settled themselves into a state to make any sort of decisions, the last edge of the horizon had its color wiped away into black. Rey had briefly entertained the idea of spending the night at the abandoned base or temple, her eyes dropping to where Finn’s fingers had twisted themselves into a knot--he needed the rest, they all did, but there wasn’t room in the base with the heaps of boxes, and any entrance to the temple was closed over by thick swathes of vines.

“Slicing through it would obviously not be a problem,” Rey said. “But something tells me I shouldn’t disturb the place.” She turned back to glance up at the structure, just a dark splotch against a darker background now.

“So we’re walking back in the dark,” Jessika sighed. “Super. Are you good to go, Finn?”

“Yeah, yeah… ‘m fine,” he said. Straightened his back with a cough, shook his hands out, stretching his fingers after they had been curled so tightly--with his brow knit the way it was, the way Jessika had seen so many times as she and the rest of the pilots had explained something he’d missed growing up in the First Order, she suspected that there was a depth to his worry the rest of them had not noticed.

She also suspected that he might not want them to notice, at least not yet.

They trekked back across the steppes in silence without having to even shut C3PO down--an actual miracle, if Jessika had ever seen one. And after the first hour, Finn was able to store the glowrod back in his bag: first the stars had sparked in one by one and then the moon rose, a yellow orb bigger than any other moon she’d ever seen. It lit the path before them, casting deep shadows where their steps had flattened the glass.

Jessika was behind Finn and Rey, who had opted to take the lead back to the Falcon. They stayed in step, close, so much so that whenever one of them stepped on an unexpected rock, the jolt would brush their shoulders together. Though they didn’t make eye contact, didn’t so much turn their heads toward the other: Finn stared ahead, off at an angle where the Falcon would be waiting for them in the downed trees, and Rey’s head was craned towards the moon, slowly swiveling to map out the stars around it.

The light caught the corner of Rey’s grin when she turned halfway over her shoulder, and Jessika found herself thanking the stars that she hadn’t come back with Skywalker any sooner than she did, because what in the kriff sort of _distracting_ \-- 

_Nope. Not going there, Pava._  

When they at last arrived at the entrance to the ship, hours and hours later with far too much droid maneuvering to fill them, it was a welcome sight. They collapsed around the holotable once the dock closed and wiped the sweat and dirt from their faces. 

“You’ve got a… hold on,” Rey said, and she reached forward to pull a leafy twig from the tangled braid over Jessika’s shoulder. “Got it.” And there was that grin again. 

Jessika wanted to kick herself. Rey redirected the grin to the twig itself, feeling the leaves between her fingers and scratching absently at the bark--and Finn snorted, kicked her lightly under the tight confines of the table, because his knee knocked against Jessika’s in the process, and she redoubled on trying to determine the mechanics of kicking oneself.

“I know we’re all exhausted and sleep-deprived, _but_ ,” she said, and finally Rey put the twig down and she could live peacefully a little bit longer. “Does anyone have an idea of what our next step could be?” 

“I still think we should check the back channels to see if Poe is broadcasting anything,” Finn said. “If he is, we go get him. If he isn’t--” He opened and closed his mouth a few times before sighing into his hand. “Would he still be on Dantooine if he wasn’t at the base? Jessika, what do you know about the local species?” 

“Not a lot,” she said. “I mean, most of my knowledge about this planet is from a military standpoint but… there’s not much here. There’s a humanoid species here but they’re not advanced enough to make a city where he would lay low or to think about taking him for ransom.” 

They fell silent, and after a few moments C3PO began to look between the three of them. “Pardon me, Master Finn--if I may be of assistance--”

“Get to the point, nerf herder,” Jessika said.

“Very well--I’ve calculated the odds of Commander Dameron still being on-planet since obtaining this new data and it’s very slim. He is likely elsewhere.” When no one said anything or even looked at him, he added, “I should also tell you that the Millennium Falcon’s transmission system is a tad problematic… lately certain atmospheric conditions have been interfering with it.”

Finn drummed his fingers on the table and frowned. “Okay. All right. So let’s get off this rock,” he said as he stood, squeezing past C3PO and heading to the cockpit. 

Rey glanced over at her, sharing the determined expression that had overtaken Finn since they left the base, and Jessika met it with a nod. There was no use in stewing in the disappointments of one dead end.

They settled into the front two seats of the cockpit, Finn already staving off antsy squirming in his second-row seat. C3PO clanked down beside him and offered an awkward couple pats on his shoulder--and as much as Jessika wanted to tell the droid to go back to the main cabin, seeing the tension ease in Finn’s frame kept her mouth shut.

“Well, it’s been fun, Dantooine,” she muttered under her breath, and soon the ship was groaning out of the debris and rising through the cloudless sky. A couple shudders of turbulence rocked them in their seats as they flew past the atmosphere and--

“Maybe you shouldn’t have spoken so soon,” Rey said lightly.

“For the record, I _was_ being sarcastic,” she said.

It was likely that the galaxy or the Force or whatever had been listening had not yet discovered the finer subtleties of language--though, considering the swarm of TIE fighters whining towards them, Jessika was willing to bet it just had a sick sense of humor.

“We’re doomed!” C3PO said simply to himself.

“Shut up,” Finn said before turning back to them. “The blaster controls are below, I’m headed down there now--”

“Wait,” Jessika said, and she grabbed at his wrist as he got up to leave. “No offense, but I’m the second best shot in the Resistance, let me--”

“This is nothing like an X-wing, he knows what he’s doing!” Rey said. Her voice had started to climb in volume--not from panic, gauging from her hands flying over the control panels in a calm concise manner, a mirror of Poe on the flight simulator, and Jessika began the defensive maneuvers hardly realizing that she had let go of Finn and his footsteps had faded down the hall.

Two short wails were quickly followed by a shudder, C3PO’s babbling on about the sheer _size_ of the fleet before them, as if they hadn’t noticed already. But the shields were up and red blaster shots were spitting towards the TIE fighters from Finn’s position at the gunner and a few connected, bright orange sparks of explosions in different pockets of her vision.

“You got a plan?” she shouted to Rey over the din--a couple alarms had started to sound, nothing Rey appeared too concerned about to vocalize, and the green bullets were whizzing with more frequency and increasingly accurate aim.

“We have to escape!”

“That’s a goal, not a plan, by the way!”

Rey didn’t seem to care about the distinction, standing to move to a better position to man the controls, and the Falcon careened through the mob of them a full ninety degrees from parallel, dipping and never staying at one angle long enough for more than a glancing shot to hit the shields. (Which were, Jessika noted grimly, as old and garbage as the rest of the ship, because they were falling more rapidly than shields should from those types of hits.) And no matter how many fighters Finn downed, the numbers never seemed to fall with them.

“Threepio’s right, we can’t go up against this many,” Rey said as she jerked the controls sharply to the left, nearly vaulting the droid right out of his seat. “We need to hyperspace our way out of here and lay low.”

“Where are we supposed to do that?”

“You know this galaxy better than I do--pick someplace and _go_ \--”

The hyperspace controls sat right in front of Jessika’s seat: the knobs and buttons were grimy and worn from use and likely a lack of proper cleaning, stray strands of Wookie hair caught in the tight grooves--it was all she could look at as Rey and Finn struggled to keep their collective heads above water as the cloud of First Order troops now appeared to grow in number even as Finn’s aim steadily improved. Her mind was a blank. _Where were they supposed to go?_

There were the systems and planets of the New Republic, none too keen on accepting a known Resistance vessel; the other systems tightly controlled by the Order, the single planets here and there under the Hutts or other crime lords--Jessika brought a map of the galaxy up in her mind’s eye and attempted to focus as the Falcon whirled and shook and the blaster fire outside grew more and more intense.

And as much as she tried to scan the full breadth of the map, she kept returning to one planet, a planet whose coordinates she knew better than the names of half the new techs back on D’Qar. If they weren’t going to be taking a hyperspace lane, she couldn’t risk flying anywhere else.

In seconds, the stars stretched and warped before the propulsors flung them into the ether.

“That was some flying,” she gasped as Rey collapsed against the back of her seat, and she was met with a tiny uptick of her lips.

“Thanks.” Rey’s grin pushed into something quieter before she looked back over her shoulder--Finn’s footfalls could be heard clanging loudly on the grated floors. “You’ve gotten better at that contraption, Finn.”

“If you say so,” he sighed, wiping sweat from his brow. “Where exactly are we going?”

The two of them, and then C3PO after a beat, turned to stare at her. She could see the blurred swaths of the galaxy rushing past them and was half waiting for a TIE fighter to do the impossible and sneak up beside them to send them to a bright green death. “Corulag,” she said finally. “No First Order presence, independent from the New Republic. It’s near the Deep Core, but we should be okay.”

“Excuse me, Captain Pava,” C3PO said, leaning into their circle. “But how can you be so certain of this particular planet’s alliances?”

“Because brass-brain…” Jessika gripped his skull and pushed him back into his seat. “Corulag is my home world.”

**********

Carth may not still have been working down at the ship bay in this sector of the planet, old as he was by the time Jessika left for the Academy, but his presence lingered in the stale scent of vanilla incense soaked into the walls of his old office and in the glimmer of recognition from the younger man whose feet were propped up on Carth’s old desk. Jessika leaned against the doorframe as they eyed each other, and she could hear C3PO murmuring behind her to Finn and Rey, who were both telling him to stop worrying. 

“That your freighter?” the man said, jutting his chin towards the window overlooking his desk onto the floor of the hangar.

“Flew it here, didn’t we?”

“I’m gonna have to see some identification--”

“Look, we’re kind of in a hurry, and I got a lot of credits with your name on it if you let us stash it back where Carth used to store those V-wings he salvaged from the war.”

At that, the man looked her square in the eyes and straightened his back enough that his feet slid off the desk and to the ground. “Carth Pic’s been gone from here for a long time.”

“So have I.” She pulled the scratched credit chips from her pants pocket and smacked them down on the desk. “This is twice the rate he would charge for a ship that size. We’ll take it back there. You don’t get our names.”

With the way he was trying to spread the stack of chips, she knew he was trying--and failing--to be discreet in counting how many were really there, as if she was going to drop every single suspicious line in the book on top of trying to swindle him. (As if she hadn’t heard the General tell tale after precautionary tale during stealth mission briefings about a certain _someone_ she knew from her youth and the consequences of that particular type of hubris.)

“Not a lot of people know about that back section, you know,” he said lightly.

“It’s a good thing I do, then, if we’re going to park it ourselves.”

The smirk that had started to crawl up his cheek slid back to its place. The art of subtlety was long lost on him. “Fine,” he said, swiping up the credits. “You have a deal. Now go on, store your kriffing ship.”

A single, stiff nod and she turned on her heel, nearly stepping right on Rey and Finn’s toes before they grabbed C3PO by the elbows and started back to the Falcon. They both looked at her like they wanted to ask her something--that, or waiting for an explanation that she knew better than to give in the middle of a hangar that could amplify a murmur three times over. But while the airiest of whispers could bloom into an echo, the scuffs of their shoes against the specially-cured concrete had a duller bounce back--space never changed, the sounds or lack thereof, even when it was grounded.

As she carefully navigated the Falcon towards the abandoned back wing of the hangar, the silence pressed in on them through the windows. But it was closer there in the cockpit, crowded with their bodies and the whirs and beeps of the control panel and C3PO’s inner workings, and the transition was jarring, forcing her to allot most of her energies to keeping her face from screwing up in that contorted grimace Kaydel had found so endearing.

“Carth was who first taught me how to fly,” she said. The words mashed up together in their hurry to get out. “I hung out here a lot when I was a teenager. So now you know.”

That end of the hangar was close to the northwest corner, where a door bent on complaining any time it was moved led to one of the many pedestrian bridges between the towering buildings that dominated this side of the planet. Carth’s old hiding space had grown grimier than usual every since he left, whenever that had been, and the door groaned even more spectacularly than she could have imagined.

“C’mon, it’s not far,” she said with a jerk of her head. One flight of stairs up and they found themselves in a fairly crowded walkway at least three hundred feet above the ground, though they could hardly see it through the web of structures similar to this one connected the high-rises to anything else in its reach. 

Rey and Finn were glued to the glass wall. “Wouldn’t it be easier just to head to the bottom?” Finn said. “Might avoid all these people.”

“No,” Jessika said sharply. “This is actually quicker, and we’ve got enough trouble on our hands without worrying about what goes on down there.”

Finn accepted this with a shrug and pulled away, but Rey’s eyes kept climbing higher and higher, trying to spot the top of the building the walkway was leading them towards. The hub of Crullov City was the largest of any in the northern hemisphere and rose to a staggering three hundred stories, all dull durasteel and windows tinted black against the scalding summer sun. “You said nearly the whole planet is like this?” Rey asked. “How?”

“I’ll tell you on the way there, but we really ought to get going.”

They pushed their way into the hub--down three flights of stairs in the main atrium that reached up to nearly the top stories of the building, all lined with a golden-tinted marble that was doing its best to outshine C3PO’s own coating. Jessika was maneuvering them hastily through the throngs of people--whether she could actually trust Carth’s replacement she hadn’t quite decided, and, despite the overwhelmed huffs coming behind her, she knew it was the only way to keep from getting swallowed amid the sea of legs.

“Wait--” Rey called, and suddenly her hand was latched in Jessika’s. “So we don’t get separated.”

Her cheeks immediately burned, only burning hotter as she furiously told herself to _cut it the pfassk out_ \--looking over her shoulder, she saw that Rey’s other hand was firmly grasping Finn’s, who in turn had a grip on C3PO’s wrist. To Jessika’s Corulag-native street smarts, they looked completely out-of-place forming this human snake chain, worse than the tourists that would overrun the main hub of Curamelle during the summer festivals. If the goal was to be discreet, they’d certainly failed--already two Mon Calamari traders were eyeing them oddly.

“If you say so,” she said over her shoulder.

After a number of turns and flights of stairs, they emerged into another pedestrian walkway: it was much lower than the one connected to the hangar and narrower too, with the marble tile lining the floor dull from a lack of care. Finn and Rey sighed and dropped their hands in relief when they saw no one else was there.

“It’s not far now.” Jessika started to head towards the building ahead, but she could sense something was off--she paused and turned back around, and the rest of them were standing motionless at the center of the walkway, eyes squeezed shut or glancing down at C3PO’s feet, and she immediately wanted to kick herself. “I should have warned you about what it’s like here,” she said. “I forgot not everyone is used to that sort of thing.”

“Never seen that many people moving that fast in one place before,” Rey muttered, running a hand over her face. Her shoulders set back in their usual strong stance, shaking whatever she had been feeling to the side and away from the conversation; one hand at Finn’s elbow, and he finished collecting himself as well.

“It’s no Coruscant, but--what is it, Captain Pava?” C3PO cocked his head to the side, genuinely curious.

They should have left him on the Falcon, but no--no, Finn had to argue for his potential usefulness fixing the old transmitter Jessika said she had back home and that the risk of him calling the General had not abated in the slightest. Regardless, her patience had thinned to dangerous levels in an instant and she was ready to close the gap between them and shove him down the nearby stairwell.

“I don’t care if it’s not as big or crowded as Coruscant,” she said pointedly. “If you’ve never been to a city world, it’s overwhelming.” Somewhere a few flights up a door slammed, the echo falling down the each individual step with a thud, rolling to a stop at their feet. Specifically: between hers and Rey’s. “I mean,” she said with a sigh, “It’s just--”

“It wasn’t that big of a deal,” Rey said. “Realy. I’m fine.” Her mouth had pressed into a thin line and she’d decidedly looked back out the window, past the grime and the slivers of skyline caught between two smaller structures. 

“Right, right.” Jessika glanced over at Finn, who was wearing a flickering grimace. Then at C3PO, who always looked sort of alarmed and, at this point, for good reason. “I… like I said, it’s not far.”

And it wasn’t--but the familiar route, normally so quick under the terms of muscle memory, dragged on as she replayed again and again the past minute. Did Rey really need to be defended like that in front of everyone? Of course not, of course not, and even if she did, Jessika didn’t know her well enough to know if she would have wanted it at all--but she could have guessed, right? With the life Rey had led--and wasn’t that what Kaydel had said, anyway--

Poe had been the one to finally come see what had caused her to hole herself up in the common area, flicking through one of the books from the collective library that she’d already read ten times. Chewing diligently on the nail of her little finger, then down along the skin beside it until there was a small globule of blood by the cuticle. She hardly noticed, but Poe had sat down beside her to listen. Because he knew what had happened, what was a blank slate to the rest of the pilots and analysts that couldn’t understand why Jessika and Kaydel suddenly repelled each other like the same poles of a magnet. _It wasn’t enough for me to find about everything else. She told me I was overbearing, that she would have gotten a rancor if she needed someone to sic on the asshole analysts that badly._

Even with the knowledge of her flaws barrelling towards her from a distance, she still couldn’t quite figure out how to step out of the way in time.

But the self-indulgent wallowing would have to wait--they were only a few doors away now, and the least she could do was warn them. “Just so you know, she can be a lot,” she said, “but she is very well-intentioned.” Unit G2180’s door stood before them, the identifying letter and numbers polished until they were able to shine even in the light from a waning bulb in the ceiling above. “My grandmother,” she said to Rey and Finn’s questioning looks. “Surprise, surprise. This is where I grew up.”

Jessika raised a hand to the door, ready to knock with the knuckle of her first finger, waiting for the inevitable question that always seemed to follow. But they said nothing, and the quick raps at the metal door clanged and filled the whole hallway.

“Perhaps we should have called ahead?” C3PO said after a beat, but it was soon followed by the clear sound of a hand knocking against his breastplate. “Mistress Rey, I beg your--”

“You don’t know how to take a hint, do you?”

But the door creaked open, the familiar whine of long-unoiled hinges pushing a lump into Jessika’s throat, which grew thicker seeing her grandmother’s iron-gray hair now turned completely white. “Hi Nai-Nai.”

Nai-Nai’s face fell open into a wide grin even as she looked the rest of the group up and down, squinting into her thick glasses and hovering over C3PO’s static expression in particular. “I didn’t think they gave you vacation time in the underground,” she said, and the grin was still there even if the tone of voice had shifted ever so slightly towards the suspicious, something Jessika knew no one else would pick up. Even the slight quirk of her thin eyebrow could translate into _what have you gotten yourself into?_

“Well,” Finn started, “that’s not really the case, ma’am--”

“I know it’s not, I’m not dense,” Nai-Nai said, stepping aside. “Now come inside before the neighbors hear you blabbering. Berloc wouldn’t know his own business even if was labeled.”

Jessika let the others go ahead as Nai-Nai kept talking and ushering them in towards the tiny living room; she let the door click behind her with another groan of the hinges that had wriggled its way into a permanent place in her memory. Looking down at her hands, Jessika half expected to see the scar on her left palm red and angry, fresh from where she sliced it open helping Carth fix a speeder--it had grown pale, fading into just another line that curled up in her fist. Nai-Nai’s decor hadn’t done anything to deter that expectation, either: the same holophotos were displayed on the walls, the couches still hadn’t been refurbished from their awful threadbare mud-green. The same pearl earrings were drooping slightly in Nai-Nai’s ears, just at an angle a little deeper than before.

“Jessika,” Nai-Nai said, and she was pulled out of the fog. Down the length of the long narrow apartment, Finn, Rey, and C3PO had seated themselves on one of the ugly couches, the set of their shoulders betraying the awkward tension. “Get some water for everyone, please, and--oh, you’re a droid. Do you need oil or a charging station or something? I haven’t actually spoken with a droid since right after the war--that Berloc next door had gotten his leg broken at the hub and some medical droid came to look after him, and I just _never_ knew what to say…”

“I’m quite all right, actually,” C3PO said quickly.

“Okay, if you say so,” she sighed, settling in on the other side of Finn from Rey. “When are you going to tell me what’s going on?” she added when Jessika set the waters down on the table. Some dribbled down the sides of the glasses in the hurry to try to steer her away from the path she’d seemed to have settled on, the winding thing that picked up any stray concept along the way and wove itself into an impossible knot.

Living alone would do that to anyone, but here it only made a natural quirk worse.

“When you let me get a word in,” she said with a light smile, and thankfully Nai-Nai only snorted and held her hands up.

“I haven’t seen you since you graduated the Academy, you know.” Her bony hands were shaky picking up the glass nearest to her, the purple veins bulging up against the skin. “No fault of your own, I know,” she said when Jessika opened her mouth to protest. “But calls home aren’t the same with all you can’t tell me. I don’t even know who your friends are!”

Though Finn and Rey were suddenly tripping over themselves to give an overdue introduction, Jessika could hardly pay attention to Finn’s earnest near-stuttering, Rey’s nodding, her hesitant grip as she shook Nai-Nai’s hand. Her grandmother would never say as much, but slipped between the letters was always what she had meant to say but had been too guarded to let past the cavity of her chest.

( _I’ve missed you, Jessika_.)

“Well,” Jessika sighed. “Call this making up for lost time.”

( _I’ve missed you, too_.)

They couldn’t tell her everything, of course. The Resistance’s informational security policies were amorphous, relying on the General’s trust in her people and in their common sense to know what intel could be shared and with whom. So they were generic: a downed pilot near the Tingel Arm, an unauthorized rescue mission, a surprise attack from the First Order. No mention of Poe’s identity in particular, which would have only added to Nai-Nai’s endless list of questions; no mention of Rey’s training to be a Jedi or Finn’s past as a stormtrooper. Jessika was sure to cut the two of them off when their contributions to the story even so much as felt like going in that direction.

“We just need to borrow the transmitter,” Finn said. “And then we’ll be out of your hair.”

“You say that like it’s an inconvenience.”

“We don’t want to put you in danger,” Rey said with a grimace.

Nai-Nai snorted and rolled her eyes. “Danger? Please. This is nothing. Now it’s getting near time to eat--let me fix you all something while you get that transmitter running again, stars know it needs some help, haven’t been able to listen to the radio since you left, Jessika…" 

( _It’s been lonely, you know. Just me here._ ) 

“Well, we’ll have you listening to Railin’s morning show again in no time.”

( _I know. I’m sorry._ )

********** 

The first order of business was making sure C3PO busied himself with something other than the delicate tinkering in Jessika’s old room. Finn quickly suggested to Nai-Nai that she get him to help her in the kitchen, and soon C3PO was being ordered around the cramped space with an apron thrown around his neck, holding a bundle of vegetables in one hand while his red arm was stirring whatever hissing mix she’d already managed to put together. Nai-Nai was overjoyed: Jessika had always been a hopeless sous chef, and C3PO was fluent in Nai-Nai’s mother tongue. 

“Isn’t Corulag’s official language Basic?” Finn asked as Rey dismantled the back of the difficult piece of equipment.

“It is,” Jessika said. “But she and my grandfather moved here from Dandoran before my dad was born. Basic was only spoken in the capital.” Once again she held her breath waiting for them to ask because it was more explicit now and all they had to do was tag on the thought to a simple _where_ \--

But Nai-Nai and C3PO were laughing, which brought a smile to both Finn and Rey’s faces. “What are they going on about?” Rey said.

Truthfully, Jessika hadn’t been listening that much--her facility with the language had been tenuous at best even during childhood, but she could pick up bits and pieces, untranslated names that could hint at the rest of the conversation. “Threepio mentioned Endor a bunch, so… I guess he’s talking about something from the war. Not sure.”

Rey had her tongue between her teeth while she fiddled with some of the wires, pulling stray pieces of metal from the depths of the transmitter’s inner workings. But her eyes kept straying towards Jessika, though hopefully not long enough for Rey to realize her cheeks were starting to singe.

“Poe told me his parents fought in the Battle of Endor,” Finn said quietly.

“Really! I never knew,” Rey said with a quick glance up. “Kind of a legacy then, isn’t he?”

And Finn laughed, handed Rey whatever screwdriver she was blindly tapping the ground for. “Don’t let him hear you say that.”

“Why not?” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Jessika regretted it. She’d had her own limited experience with Poe and bringing up his parents, both featuring spectacular cases of foot-in-mouth disease on her part, and if Finn was closer to Poe than she was, then it wasn’t her business to pry into something she wasn’t chosen to know.

But she still asked. She still noticed, too, how Finn referred to him in the present tense.

“He tensed up funny a couple of times when some of the older officers brought up parts of the war,” he said, eyes on his hands. Rey had given him a circuit board to tinker with while she pulled out more and more wires. “You know it didn’t really end with Endor, right?”

“Everyone knows that,” she shrugged.

“I literally lived in wreckage from the Battle of Jakku,” Rey deadpanned.

“Right, right… well…” Finn sighed. “We had that recon mission to Naboo a while back, right? I think it was before you got back, Rey. And--ow,” he hissed. Part of the circuit let out a thin wisp of white smoke. “Anyway. The General talked about strategic places around the capital from when she and Poe’s mother flew together to help get the last parts of the Empire out. And Poe got all weird. Fidgety. And he doesn’t fidget. He didn’t lose his cool _once_ when I was helping him escape before but-- _kriff_ , Rey, what is wrong with this thing?” He threw the circuit in front of him and stuck the pad of his zapped finger in his mouth.

“Oh,” she grimaced. “Those wires are faulty, no wonder. I’m sorry. Here,” she said, but he pushed the colorful bundle back. “Finn--”

“I can’t talk and wire at the same time, okay? We’re not all that gifted. Okay,” he said once Rey rolled her eyes and grinned. “I asked him about it that night after we turned out the lights. He didn’t answer right away. Said something about if you’re always carrying a hundred-pound box then you don’t need someone mentioning it to you.”

He sighed again, shrugged, picked the circuit board back up. With the new material Rey had given him, it was rewired without another shock to his fingers--they worked nimbly within the tiny spaces, and he hardly had to pause to ask Rey for direction even if it was evident he had never done this before. Finn had done so little of what Jessika had taken for granted in her life that he didn’t realize how rare it was that Poe turned over to show the soft, vulnerable underbelly of himself that he normally kept hidden under his fight suit. She’d seen it a couple times, murky through the haze of liquor on an X-wing one night, or in a nervous muttered comment after a debriefing--but he’d curl it back into his jacket, hidden where no one could see and trace it back to the commander they trusted in the sky.

“I walked into our bunk once,” he said and handed the circuit back to Rey. “It was right after you and Skywalker came back. Poe was calling his dad with BB-8’s communication system. I think his dad tried to talk about Skywalker, something like, ‘you’ve met him before, remember?’ but Poe ended the call when I walked in. I--I don’t know.” He watched Rey click the circuit into place, twist a more bolts in and replace other wires she had yanked out almost indiscriminately. “He did mention taking me to Yavin 4 whenever things slowed down. I don’t know if he was serious now that I think about it, but…”

He looked back up away from the half-dismantled transmitter, towards Jessika, and something in the way he shrugged at her slotted in a few missing pieces in the puzzle that had been the two of them, Finn and Poe, but the final image was still a blur. An abstract. But it was still an abstract of something that didn’t resemble what she had seen of Poe since he joined the Resistance, the apparent shape of himself when he let the easy personna drop, revealing it to be stiff suit, grating and rubbing him raw.

“I think that should do it,” Rey said. She screwed everything back in its place, switched on a few levers and dials--the lights blinked hopefully, the static hissed. Adjusting the knobs, she was able to land on a couple local news stations, a sports broadcast from Corellia, a few hazy transmissions in Huttese from the other side of the galaxy. “You know the frequencies, right?”

Jessika took the transmitter from her gingerly, their fingers brushing slightly. Rey pulled back in a hurry and squeezed her hands into the bends of her knees. “I mean, yeah. There’s only a couple that are still secure after all these years, so…”

The first frequency was filled with heavy static, a couple low tones breaking through the fuzz at irregular intervals--if it was code, it wasn’t standard, not anything Poe would have been likely to use if he actually wanted to be rescued. The next two were silent. No static. Unusual, even by old Rebel Alliance standards. The fourth had been turned into what sounded like a First Order propaganda station, though they couldn’t be sure. The transmission wasn’t in Basic or any language the three of them knew. (“Threepio might,” Rey offered, but tepidly, as if she realized halfway through the idea that they wouldn’t want to have the translation. It wasn’t Poe, and that was all that mattered.)

“How many more are left?” Finn asked after a moment.

“Just one.” It might have been worth mentioning that the third frequency had probably been their best bet, one that the General had called a backup after the second Death Star had finally been destroyed. Had the circumstances been different, Jessika probably would have said it without a second thought--the grip of her natural pessimism was seeping back into the grooves of her thoughts. The urge to bring these idiots down a peg so they could work with what was before them rather than the distorted shadow cast by the light of their hope.

“But there’s still a chance,” she said, forcing herself to grin at Finn, then wider when he mirrored her.

(Poe had nestled his way into the fabric of that boy in a way that she could not explain, only identify. Poe was there, and she wasn’t about to pluck out those threads with an ill-thought-out stab at pragmatism.)

When she twisted the knob, there was only static.

“Or not,” he said softly.

“Just because he’s not transmitting anything right this second doesn’t mean he still isn’t out there,” Rey said. “He’s still alive, I just _know_ somehow--”

“I get it, okay? I know.” He ran his hands over his face and rolled one of the bolts Rey had pulled from the back of the transmitter under his finger. “But it was the only lead we had. He’s probably--” He cut himself off with a huff.

“Look,” Jessika said, and she hesitantly placed her hand on his knee. “We need to eat. And this place is safe. We can map out our next move and be on our way.”

A warm and tangy aroma had finally bled from the kitchen down to the bedroom--the unmistakable sign of the stew the Pavas had brought with them from Dandoran. Jessika hadn’t had it since the night she left for her Academy training.

“She’s certainly pulling out all the stops for you,” Jessika said, trying not to stare at Rey too conspicuously--she had pulled her head back, eyes shut, revelling in that particular way the scent tingled your nose that Jessika knew all too well.

“It’s delicious,” Rey sighed.

Finn snorted. “You haven’t even had it yet.” For a moment, Jessika thought she saw him briefly look her way, a small smirk twitching onto his face--like he knew that she had been staring because her face felt a little hot, and that only happened when she was _obvious_ about it, like when Poe had to kick her under the table at dinner. But there was no table and no Poe to know to kick her, and no, she hadn’t imagined Finn’s look: it was there again when she realized Rey was grinning at her, the room silent, and she was staring open-mouthed like a kriffing idiot.

“I’m sorry, must’ve zoned out for a second,” she said. Swallowed. Cast a pointed look at Finn, the kind she has used to shut up Nien Nunb and Iolo from across the situation room any number of times, and he only shrugged.

( _You’re losing your damn touch, Pava, get it together_. And it wasn’t her own voice admonishing her, but Poe’s. Later that same day after a number of kicks under the table. Laughing, elbowing her in the side as he threw a grease-blackened rag over his shoulder. Because he could try to teasingly cajole her into just _asking her out_ in the safety of his corner of the air strip, waggling his hips and shoulders as he sauntered up to her: _c’mon, Testor, lay down some of your usual moves and she won’t know what hit her_. BB-8 would beep like they were giggling--and she imagined that corner of the air strip with another T-70. New grease blotting over a sacred space, and it slipped across the stars and into her tightening chest.)

“I just asked,” Rey said, still grinning, “if what your grandmother is cooking _is_ delicious. Because I’m sure I’m right.”

“You are.”

“That wasn’t the point,” Finn said. “But fine.”

Outside, C3PO’s feet tapped along the floor, a skittish morse code of an undercurrent that pushed them to crane their necks above water without a blip of desperation. Jessika could sense their thoughts racing in the same way hers had been, reaching out to the closest version of Poe they could find in their memories when faced with another dead end. The charade couldn’t keep up--Rey’s smile began to fade, Finn’s despondency bubbled back, and it was all too evident that there was no close version of Poe at all. The ones they carried with them still existed over an impassable chasm, and all it did was grow wider and deeper and shrink the figure of Poe standing on the other side to a smudge.

“Mistress Pava wanted me to inform you that--oh.” C3PO had appeared at the door, the lilac apron now tied around his waist. He looked between the three of them. “No luck with locating Commander Dameron, I take it.”

“No luck at all,” Finn said.

The droid’s arms lowered, and he almost seemed to sigh. “I am sorry. I had high hopes that this would lead us to him. Dinner is ready, however. Do come get something to eat.”

Nai-Nai was bustling around the small, scratched table straightening the threadbare placemats before setting down the rest of the odds and ends she was pulling from the cabinets--cloth napkins, a nice set of spoons Jessika had never seen. Whistling under her breath that same old five-note tune.

“I don’t know where you’ve all been,” Nai-Nai said, gesturing towards Rey and Finn, “so you may have had something like this before--see, Jessika’s grandfather and I came from an old Hutt territory planet, so some of our food is fairly similar. You’ve heard of chuba stew, right? Well, the Hutts make it with gorgs, but you’d be hard pressed to find gorgs anywhere in Crullov City. Not to mention their meat is foul, frankly. My substitutions have only improved it.” The rest of them could only stand idly while she shuffled between the steaming pot and the table, leaving a full bowl at each chair. “Well go on, sit down! Stars know the last time you must have had a good meal.” 

After a moment’s hesitation, Finn and Rey found their spots on the far side of the table, leaving Jessika and C3PO to face them and Nai-Nai at the head; slowly, one by one, they dipped their spoons into the stew, eyeing each other, unsure of the protocol of this new territory. This wasn’t the first time Jessika had shared a meal with the two of them, but it was the first time outside of the D’Qar base’s cafeteria, outside the din that would smother most conversation until you were sitting at a particular table and where predictable arguments would arise from the officers’ corner, or between Snap and Karé whenever the kitchen served spiceloaf.

“I don’t want to bring up a possibly sore subject, but did you fix the transmitter?” Nai-Nai asked after a few minutes of half-watching Rey slurp quickly through her entire helping.

“Yes, but…” Jessika started. Her voice wavered under Nai-Nai’s stare, but her wrinkled face folded into a sympathetic frown.

“You couldn’t find your pilot,” she sighed. “I’m so sorry. Are you…” She set her spoon down with a clink and rubbed at her temples. “I just hope they haven’t fallen into the hands of those awful stormtroopers… you know,” she said, “I quite had enough of the Jedi and the stormtroopers after the Clone Wars, and--yes, it was awful what happened to the Jedi, I’m not denying that, but when both planets you’ve lived on get overrun with one side or another, and--well. You tend to want all the sides of this war to just be done with. Especially”--and with that she reached out and placed a hand on Finn’s arm--“when they might have your friend.”

Finn tensed up, and Nai-Nai must have read it as worry for Poe because she gave him a light squeeze, squinted into a smile that gave her eyes the perfect reassuring twinkle. And Jessika had hoped that there would have been a way to avoid bringing up the Clone Wars and the Empire and the whole segueing tirade that would inevitably come with it. It sounded like a bad joke: _so a Jedi-in-training, defected stormtrooper, and civilian traumatized by war walk into a cantina--who shoots first, and can you even tell?_

“Has there been much First Order activity in that part of the galaxy?” Finn asked--first to Rey and Jessika, then turning back to Nai-Nai. The tension along his shoulders had eased but his mouth was still pressed to a thin line. “Other than. Y’know,” he added in a mutter. He cocked his head: _there was a reason we were caught off guard_ , it seemed to say.

“Oh, I wouldn’t know anything for certain,” Nai-Nai said. The hand holding her spoon waved away the notion and little flecks of the chuba stew flew past Jessika’s face. “I’m too old for any of that spy nonsense--but.” Her first finger held in the air, a dramatic pause. “Jessika, dear, you remember Lucia?”

“I would hope so,” she said. “Why?”

“I’m sorry, who?” Finn said quickly.

“Old friend of Jessika’s from grade school--Lucia was a few years behind her, stayed on working odd jobs around the hub after a couple years in Curamelle. She can help you.”

“Nai-Nai,” Jessika sighed. “It’s not that we wouldn’t appreciate the help, but how is a civilian supposed to get us any information that could give us a lead?”

“All you Resistance types think you’re the only ones working against the First Order. Come on.” She hopped up and shuffled over to slip on her shoes. “I said, come on--we’re going to go see her. Chop chop, you should be embarrassed this senior citizen is beating you right now, come on--”

So they scrambled, left the dishes on the table and only remembered to toss C3PO’s apron back in the apartment after they’d already taken a few steps outside--Nai-Nai led the way, still going on about an old story from when Jessika and Lucia had taken a week during a summer break to travel to the oceans on the far side of the planet’s cluster of cities. C3PO took up the rear, complaining that the rest of the group was moving too quickly for the limited motion of his legs. Stuck in the middle with Finn and Rey, Jessika could only try to ward off their silent and dramatic gestures imploring her for an answer she couldn’t possibly give them. _How do we know we can trust this person? Your grandmother is lovely but is she also out of her mind?_

For the moment, she was glad that they were too worried about this turn of events to listen to Nai-Nai’s story, a practiced retelling of a week using events she couldn’t have known didn’t happen the way she described--and it fit. It really fit that in the midst of what was turning into a search and rescue that she would have to see Lucia--

“Here,” Nai-Nai said, stopping, and the four of them nearly bumped into her. “Lucia should be in the back room of Sibosa’s store. Or that’s where she was working out of last week. Now come back when you’re through so I can at least send you off with something for the road, all right?”

They watched her go, a pit of acid growing in Jessika’s stomach, and as soon as her gray hair disappeared around the corner, Rey whispered, “What in stars’ name is this about?”

“I don’t know, okay?” This was the last place she wanted to be, betting the fate of her best friend on someone she hadn’t spoken with since she left Corulag, and for good reason. “But if she thinks Lucia can help… let’s go kriffing see.”

Jessika pushed her way through the cluttered aisles of Sibosa’s, some clothing boutique that had popped up on the outer edge of the city’s hub after she’d left. The hangers poked at their shoulders as they headed toward the back, the slick overpriced material occasionally snagging on C3PO’s edges, and if he was fussing (which he had to be) she had tuned it out.

“Wait.” Rey’s hand had latched onto her shoulder just as they came to the abandoned counter and till--it was a small hand, stronger than she had imagined, and the pads of her fingers pressed into the muscle with a warmth that spread up her collarbone and down the back of her spine. “Something’s wrong.”

“Yeah,” she deadpanned. “The four of us and Poe aren’t back on base yet.”

“Jess, you know what I mean.”

“It’s not important.” Not for what they needed to do to get back on track--but Rey kept pressing, not with her hand or words but just with a look, the soft knit of her brow and mouth tucked into a small frown, and Jessika suddenly remembered the first time she spotted her training with Skywalker, the ferocious swing of the lightsaber shining against her gritted teeth, now that same rush crawling up into Jessika’s throat, and _oh_. She was in far too deep to deny it now.

“Not sure I quite believe you,” she said, dropping her hand.

“Pardon me, Mistress Rey,” C3PO said. “I didn’t want to interrupt, but I seem to be caught on something rather stubborn and Master Finn is having the most difficult time undoing it.”

A hideous maroon felt beret had snagged on the thin protruding edges around the droid’s head, falling vertically against where his left ear would have been. “We can fix it later,” Jessika said. “I’d rather we get in and out here sooner rather than later.”

“This is _frightfully_ embarrassing,” he muttered.

“Well, there are worse things,” Finn said, rolling his eyes. “Come on.”

The door to the back room where Nai-Nai had directed them was ajar, and as much as Jessika wanted to shoulder her way in like she would have years ago, she let herself listen to Snap’s words of wisdom for maybe the first time in her life. _Diplomacy will save you many a bloody nose_.

Half a second after she knocked, Lucia’s head whipped around the door--suspicion and shock washed over her face in the next half second before finally settling on a compromise between the two that looked a lot like confusion. “Jess… it’s been a while.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“And you’ve even made new--wait a sec.” Lucia squinted past Finn and Rey, running a hand through her thick curly hair before pointing it at C3PO. “I know you.”

“I beg your pardon?” C3PO said. “I don’t believe we’ve--”

“Threepio.” Lucia quirked up her eyebrow, the one tiny motion that she could always get to say more than should have been allowed. “I was a little kid, though, so don’t trouble yourself too hard for not recognizing me. Anyway,” she said, turning her attention back to Jessika and doing a quick once-over that solidified every bit of dread into something toxic and heavy in her blood.

An itch started tickling on the bottom of her feet, urging her to grab the rest of the crew and put as much distance between them and Lucia as they could--save her all the energy keeping her from becoming something kriffing embarrassing. “Yes, anyway,” Jessika said. “Friend of ours is in trouble and we need some intel to check a lead.”

Lucia frowned. “That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“Huh, okay. You showing up here with an entourage got me worried this was something personal,” she said with a snort. “For the record, I like it a whole lot better when you and me are on the same side of things.”

Any other time, she would have taken the bait. The retort was waiting-- _could’ve fooled me, you know_ \--and she curled her tongue in her mouth to keep it back, because if she did take the bait, the hook would sink too deep into her lip for a quick extraction. And it wasn’t worth risking Poe having that kind of time.

Lucia pulled the door as far open as it would go into the closet of a room, cluttered with boxes of extra merchandise for the store and half-dismantled blasters that appeared to be leftovers from the war. The one strewn across the desk had the Rebel Alliance emblem scratched crudely over the stamp of the Empire, as if someone bored at the old base on Hoth had sat for hours to pick away at it just to convince themselves they were making a difference. Lucia brushed a couple pins and bolts off a holopad and tapped at its dark screen impatiently, the blue light flickering on and casting a glow on her dark skin.

“Can you track First Order movement on that thing?” Rey asked. “I’m Rey, by the way. And this is Finn.”

“More or less,” Lucia said. Her fingers tapped a couple more times and then a map of the Core worlds projected above their heads--between the orbs of the stars, planets, and moons were smaller specks flitting along hyperspace routes and orbiting around various systems. “Hacked my way into some of the satellites on the hub and built monitors that can read starship emissions to trace traffic patterns. The First Order fleet has a couple specific signatures, so--”

“Pfassk, this is incredible,” Jessika muttered. “How’d you do all this?”

“Nicked some junk no one was using back at Dad’s mines a while back,” she shrugged, but the nonchalance was so obviously an act. _You’re not better than me just because you’re a Resistance pilot_ , she had practically shouted. “What do you need to s--”

“Dantooine,” Finn blurted. “I, uh… we--Dantooine. A couple days ago.”

The projection zoomed out from the Core and then back in, centering on the Raiballo Sector. The image fritzed a tad as Lucia adjusted the date, squinted carefully at the lone dots swirling around the neighboring planets. “Okay, see here?” The dots froze in place and Lucia drew a circle around three in particular. “This yellow one is a newer model X-wing. These two red ones are First Order, and judging by the data one’s probably a star destroyer. Dunno about the other, something smaller. Maybe a shuttle?”

Lucia’s voice had grown smaller as she put the pieces together, and she fell back into the desk chair when the silence confirmed the suspicions and chilled the room from the center of their chests outward. When Jessika finally forced her head to move, she found Rey’s jaw pulsing from her grinding teeth. Finn could only stare down at his hands.

“This is… certainly not the outcome we had hoped for,” C3PO said after a moment.

“Where are those ships now?” Finn said. His voice had gone flat, and his hands flexed as he looked up to meet Lucia’s gaze. “Can you track them?”

“Should be able to…” The image above them flickered again, this time focused on a lone planet with a violent, writhing surface. The two red dots drifted in its orbit. “Mustafar. Been there for the better half of today.” Lucia glanced over at Jessika with a grimace, and the cold foreboding sank deeper as the scattered bits of knowledge she had about the planet gathered themselves in her head.

A molten sea of fire and rock burning through space. The amorphous connection to the rise of Darth Vader, where the details shifted from person to person and more quickly than the sloshing bubbles of magma shown in her grade school geography class.

“Thank you,” Finn said. “I--we… we appreciate this more than you know.”

Jessika watched Lucia study his face, settle into a stoicism that betrayed the years they had spent apart from each other. The diverging paths neither of them could have predicted as they had curled around each other in a fit of uncontrollable laughter on that beach when Jessika had tried to kiss each silly expression off her face. (At least until she had left for the Academy; she could have predicted it then. The fork in the road, that was the best case scenario as the ugly rift opened up.)

“We mean it,” Jessika echoed, and Lucia gave her a grim smile.

“Well, go on then,” she sighed. “Don’t waste your time thanking me.”

Finn and Rey stepped back into the store, already talking lowly about a plan, the inklings of one at least, laying out the basic steps to fill in on the fly if Jessika were to hazard a guess--and she was about to follow after them when C3PO spoke again.

“If you don’t mind my asking, when exactly did we meet? It’s bothering me immensely that I can’t seem to place it.” He cocked his head slightly to the side and finally the beret pulled loose and fell to the ground.

“My family used to live full-time on Bespin,” Lucia said as she cleared a spot on the desk to set the holopad. “We moved here to help the liberation when the last of the Empire occupation wasn’t clearing out and had started taking out civilian dissidents…” She coughed suddenly, and Jessika was thankful that she didn’t look her way. “And you’ve been to Bespin.”

“I have indeed, miss, but--oh!” he said. “The _mines_ \--”

“When you lot get back to your base, tell Han that Lando’s been asking about him, all right?” she grinned. “Because he has. A _lot_. Like every time I call home.”

Jessika felt C3PO’s eyes on her and that he was about to say something she didn’t want to get into--not now that they had an actual idea of where Poe was--so she quickly said, “We will. And thank you again.”

( _You could’ve easily turned us away. You had every reason to_.)

And she could’ve waited for Lucia to say something else--but the urgency was starting to tighten and she grabbed C3PO’s hand to follow in Finn and Rey’s wake. Thankfully they hadn’t strayed far, just outside of the storefront.

“So,” Finn said, hands coming to his hips. “Guess we got a lead.”

“Do we have a _plan_?” Jessika asked. “Or part of one?”

“Not, uh… not really,” Rey muttered. “But we have time til we get there, right? We’re good at ad-libbing.”

Finn snorted and pulled a grin onto Rey’s face, and when she turned back to Jessika to await her response, she could forget for a moment that the three of them and a useless droid were flying off to a near suicidal rescue mission on a burning planet. For that moment, the unwavering faith in that grin in not only all of them but her specifically--her, who had barely had two whole conversations with Rey before this mission--was enough to convince Jessika that their hopes weren’t going to go up in smoke.

* * *

 

It wasn’t that Poe never got angry. A low, simmering anger on the state of the galaxy had long motivated his defection to the Resistance and his dedication to the cause--but it was a rational anger that had compressed into something useful, that he had shaped until it had given him direction. The anger that he was unfamiliar with was the kind that sat in the center of your chest and throbbed until it drove all other thoughts from your head.

Neither Nines nor Phasma had bothered him since his day observing the reconditioning session, so he was left for hours and hours on end to stew in silence in the empty bunk. He replayed the propaganda behind his eyes, imagined shooting down each lie that was fed to the stormtroopers until even the version of himself in his head had a voice hoarse from shouting. The anger would build and twinge down his arms, grow hot along the back of his ears and he would want to scream--but he wouldn’t give the First Order the satisfaction. He knew they were watching.

Occasionally he would bury his head under the thin pillow and squeeze his eyes shut against the mattress until the colorful sparks began to burst against the dark, and he would try to reach out and sense for someone familiar with the newness inside him he still refused to name. Something had grown stronger since the last time--it felt like Rey, or he wanted it to feel like Rey, and almost like sonar he could sense figures around her. Or whomever it was. One, a weaker signal, felt like Finn. And last night--he’d woken from it--there had been a swell of something that had felt like hope from that collective beacon, but it only circled him back to the anger. 

_Go home. Can’t you feel me telling you to go the kriff home?_

And it would keep circling, deeper, until all the reverberations of the anger had traveled back to his cot and they amplified each other, screeching in his ear that he had been careless and rash and he had only himself to blame for the string of shit in the wake of his crash. He was better than this. The risks he took, the ones that had garnered near-demerits and harsh debriefings, they were too overcalculated to leave anything significant to chance. Except Dantooine. He hadn’t been paying attention, and now-- 

Now--

The door to the bunk was opening. A stormtrooper, not Nines or Zeroes, stood in the entry with a long blaster cradled in their arms, finger hovering near the trigger. “Up,” she said. “Come with me.”

It wasn’t registering in his head right. Even Nines when he would return for the night wouldn’t say a word to him, just tossing the allotted ration of protein bars to his cot. Poe hesitated, stared at the blank eyes of the helmet, and it must have been a second too long because the blaster was digging into his forearm and then prying his back from the wall until he stumbled to his feet.

“Now.”

She pushed him into the hall with the blaster now pointed between his shoulder blades and already he could feel the ring of a bruise rising. This used to be satisfying, almost. Knowing that he had gotten to them, that they felt the need to manhandle him while he was in their custody. Even as he bled and his bones inched closer to fracture, the pain was temporary and he could let himself grin up at his captors with rivulets of blood running between his teeth and their anger would spike. In that position it was the only thing he could realistically do for the cause was other than keeping his mouth shut during interrogations.

Poe couldn’t bring himself to do that from where he stood now. His own anger clouded his thoughts and stretched out haphazardly into the space around him: anger at the labyrinth of halls complicating any attempt at escape, anger at the threat trying to bury itself into his back, anger at the stormtrooper for following orders and the higher-ups for giving them to her and the war for not ending when it should have.

Did Alderaan perish into dust just to see an entire system follow in its wake? Did his parents fight for nothing? Did his mother die from complications from a war wound for nothing? Were he and his father left in their death-silenced house to prepare themselves to see the galaxy spin back to the same spot as if nothing had changed?

He hadn’t been paying attention to where the stormtrooper had been leading him, and the abrupt stop at the door to the ship’s main command room took Poe by surprise.

Kylo Ren was waiting on the other side, facing toward the long line of windows overlooking the rest of the star destroyer. The rest of the analysts’ posts were abandoned but the screens and buttons still flickered and beeped.

“Thank you, FN-0629. That will be all.”

And then they were alone.

“Come here, Commander Dameron.”

He wasn’t wearing his helmet, and while the daunting silver mask had crept through his nightmares since Jakku, Poe almost wished for it. The sight of Ren’s face and the hints of the General and Solo there, the angry scar striping down his cheek by Rey’s hand--it was too human for the acts Poe knew he had committed. The empty ominous shield better suited what he was.

“What do you want with me?” Poe said impatiently.

“You see that planet down there?” Ren said, pointing. It was hard to miss; the star destroyer was locked in its orbit and the whole of the northern hemisphere lit up the command room’s windows with writhing oranges and yellows. “Mustafar. Do you know why it’s important?”

Ren glanced down at him, and Poe met his stare, teeth chewing on his tongue to keep the hot flood rising up the back of his throat at bay.

“Well then.” Ren turned back to the view of the planet. “The Supreme Leader has determined that the next step in my training is to begin training someone myself. And--I couldn’t believe it myself at the time when I realized--but you have it, Poe Dameron. You have the Force.”

Poe was suddenly overly aware of the heat at the center of him, how it filled the cavity around his lungs and heart. A piece of it had spun itself thin and reached through the gaps in his ribs and out into the open, seeking a tether to the same power that burned greater within Ren--and other pieces, innumerable, sought out the this glass window, breaking through to reach for anyone and anything else.

(He’d known, in some quiet part of his thoughts, after his last encounter with Ren. And he couldn’t ignore the truth of it anymore.)

“But you have the Force,” Ren continued, strained, “not because you were born with it. No--after the war, Luke Skywalker took your mother to retrieve the last of the Force tree from the old Jedi temple. And he gave her one of the two pieces. _Her_. Not to our family, but someone… inconsequential.”

Poe’s fists were clenched so tightly that they began to shake, but he only bit down on his tongue harder until a twinge of copper seeped in his mouth.

“No one had studied the Force tree and knew the extent of its power, but the Supreme Leader had a theory. You, growing up with it, about as Force-sensitive as a rock at birth--it gave you power you never would have had, locked away. Until now.” Ren latched his hand onto Poe’s shoulder, his grip tight but not at all warm. A threat hidden in an attempted gesture of camaraderie. “You’ll need a teacher, you know.”

_No._

_Not you._

_Not here._

“You need someone to help channel all those emotions inside you,” Ren said softly. “I can feel it. I know what it’s like. There are ways with the Force that can help you.”

_Not you, not this._

_Anything but you. But this._

_Not when--_

A flash of his mother’s face drifted before his eyes: smiling in the kitchen talking to his father about something that had passed between them in the training before the Battle of Endor, and Poe thought that his chest was going to burst right open.

“I never imagined that you wouldn’t be resistant,” he said. “Which brings me back to Mustafar. We’re going to take a little trip.”

**********

Poe had expected to have something more pounding against his senses on the shuttle down to Mustafar: the anger that had started to overwhelm him, the concern for Rey and Finn who seemed to be trying to come after him. But he was numb. Ren had led him by a sharp grip to his elbow into the shuttle that had taken him from Jakku and a stormtrooper had followed close behind--Nines, he could see now.

The surface of Mustafar continued to roil beneath them and Ren spoke lowly about the history of the planet, its key role in the Empire’s rise to power. Darth Vader wouldn’t have been the man he was had it not been for Mustafar, he said. Poe sensed that he was leaving details out; Mustafar, as far as he could tell, was not a planet eager to nurture someone to their full abilities. The fire licked at dark outlines of rock and durasteel, turning it red hot in wide swatches, burning it away. Surely a human wouldn’t receive special treatment.

A human, no, but Darth Vader? He’d heard the stories as they’d circulated around D’Qar late at night when the topic turned to politics--never from his parents, who skirted around mentioning the Empire’s leaders like it would char their tongues clean off. On base, Nien Nunb and Iolo would dig their heels in and go full abstract, reaching back into the near-lost details of the Old Republic leading up to the rise of the Emperor and dredging up political theory that didn’t even apply to the way things were anymore. And they’d argue, Nien’s _I was there and_ against Iolo’s _I read somewhere that_ , and Poe and Snap and Jessika would take bets on who would stomp away first.

The one thing that the two of them would agree on, however, amid the delicate nuance of intergalactic politics, was that no matter how human Darth Vader had been born, he ruled and died with rusted metal cogs for a heart.

Was that what helped him thrive on this planet against all odds? The inside of the shuttle was starting to grow stiflingly warm from the approaching atmosphere, the gleam of the molten rock growing sharper--and all Poe could wonder was if Nien Nunb had managed to have a nice birthday.

The temperature was even worse once they landed and stepped outside: it was as hot as an oven and humid as well, slicking his and Ren’s face with sweat almost instantly and adding another surface for the magma’s glow to reflect upon. Hell season on Yavin 4 would have been a relative winter, and how appropriate it was that its extremes were beaten at last by the closest thing in the galaxy to the underworld.

( _Is this a bad dream? Am I already dead?_ )

The center cavity in him twisted, as if the Force were pushing the thought away. _No, no,_ \--he felt himself thinking in a voice that was barely his own. _Not dead yet. Furthest thing from dead._ _For the first time--aware of the full potential this power brings, aware of the web between all things._

The web twitched towards Nines and then more strongly to Ren--his black cloak fluttered in the roaring hot wind pushed by the magma and he stared over the scene before them with an odd sense of pride. It reminded Poe of his father when he’d built the table for his mother’s birthday when he was seven--but without the object of his own making, it felt misplaced.

“I’ve been meaning to come here for a long time,” Ren said. “Can you feel it, Commander Dameron?”

“Feel what?”

“The _history_ ,” he said. “The first steps of the Empire--painful as they were, and as all splits are, but crucial… you have to feel it, it’s everywhere--”

Poe focused on the warm spot in his chest, and while the spirals it was forming were too quick and complicated to pin down every iteration it took, there was a particular one that hummed at the same frequency of something old and pained that tore at him the longer his thoughts remained there. Betrayals staring each other in the eye as pieces of themselves disintegrated to nothing.

“It’s almost palpable, isn’t it?” Ren pressed.

“It is,” Poe said quietly. He knew now: betrayal was thick, corded and sharp, breaking the skin in pricks so the blood pushed up in small bubbles. He could hold it in his hand and smell the copper.

“Come with me. You too, FN-2199.”

In the distance, a metal bridge laid black against the bright backdrop--Ren was taking them in that direction, reaching into his cloak and keeping his hands within the folds there, checking for something, reassuring himself.

It wasn’t a guess: Poe knew all this, sensed it. Glanced at Nines, felt the uncertainty and the questions underneath the hardwiring compelling him to do his duty and follow orders.

The bridge was wider than he had expected when they finally arrived, leading from the cracked concrete shore where they stood to a building halfway across to the other side. The drop to the fire was a long one but the heat radiated, belched up more dark clouds of smoke to further obscure the sunlight and the easy movements of his own lungs.

The scene felt so empty: the fire, the stark and dismal structures. Not a living thing for miles except for what was right beside him.

“Here.” Ren pressed something into his hands and stepped back, putting Nines between them with the blaster head already up against his spine. “Go.”

Nines pushed him forward, out onto the bridge; Poe was vaguely aware of the heat under the soles of his shoes and the sweat dribbling down his back, but the metal rod in his hands was still sharp with the chill afforded by the protection in Ren’s robes. And the uncertainty from Nines had taken on a solid shape: _why, why, why_ , one Poe could echo. He’d just been handed a lightsaber. (Why?) Nines was leading him over what might as well have been a crack in the galaxy. (Why?)

_Help_ \--he thought it before he could stop himself. His fingers shook along the grooves of the saber’s handle even as the air kept cooking.

_Why?_

And then a shove, stumbling forward: the presence of the blaster had lifted and the sweat that had pooled around it filled in the blanks, and once he steadied his wavering footing, Poe found Nines with the blaster raised. Aiming at him. Finger on the trigger.

Ren still stood at the end of the bridge. The wind was blowing hair in his face.

“In the interest of full and fair disclosure,” he shouted, “FN-2199 has been given orders to kill you.”

Poe’s legs stopped twitching but the movement had only moved up to his hands and he could hardly keep a steady grip on the lightsaber. Did he even know how to turn it on? It had looked simple when he had spotted the blue one powering up as he flew over Takodana: hold it up straight and the blade would hum and fill up the empty space beside him. But the step between, the thing to press, it eluded him and Nines didn’t lower his weapon.

“What are you going to do, Commander Dameron?” Ren was taunting him now.

And he was _angry_ , hands fumbling to find anything close to a power switch, sweating harder from the pulse pounding inside his ear--Nines stepped forward, readjusted his finger waiting to riddle his body with bullets, and Poe found a button, pressed it, and a green blade shot out the end, sparked against the surface of the bridge, bouncing back--

It was heavy in his hand. Heavier than he imagined. But maybe it was just the strain in his arm, the tense hold of his muscle on the bones as his teeth ground watching Ren in the distance. _FN-2199 has been given orders to kill you_. The implication was there: fight to the death. A stormtrooper, not a person but a number, cannon fodder to prove a point. No value in the person under the suit, for the head that kept hurtling the _why_ out into the ether so loudly that Poe felt it ricocheting in his own skull.

He couldn’t kill him.

He was being told to. Live or die.

Nines could have a life, too. Like Finn. Could choose a real name. They all could but they were being _robbed_ \--

Poe swung the lightsaber in front of his face before he knew what he was doing, and it squealed, deflecting the shot Nines had fired. “Kriff--come on, buddy, you don’t have to do this--”

“Orders are orders.” The certainty was there, coiled around that one sentence. The rest of the waves rolling off his armor told the same story as before.

_Why_.

Stepping forward, Nines fired four more times in quick succession and all four were redirected away by the blade. Poe had never had such intuitive aim; even in his X-wing the learning curve had been steep, and still sometimes he missed. Here, clutching the stuff of legends in his sweaty hand, it was almost second nature, and every time his arm put the lightsaber between his body and another round of shots from Nines, his chest warmed under his skin.

“I’m not going to do this, Nines,” he said. He was more than three-quarters of the way across the bridge now, and beyond Nines’ helmet, he could see Ren had left his perch on the shore as well. “ _You_ don’t have to do this--”

“Yes I do, and it makes my job easier if you keep your word.”

The shots kept coming and Nines was going to back him up against the wall of the building soon and there wouldn’t be anywhere for them to go and the anger was coming back. It was coming back searing and cracking along his bones and he was shouting now with every blast he blocked with the lightsaber.

It wasn’t that nothing had changed since the war.

Ren had been right: the war had just never ended.

And he and Nines were being asked to pay the price for it, like Solo had and his mother and the countless others had, and they all deserved better than the future they fought for turning around to spit on their graves.

Poe thought he was going to split in half.

One haphazard wave of the lightsaber deflected a shot right back at the blaster, and the inside crackled and sparked. “There, see? We don’t--hey-- _Ren!_ ” Poe shouted past Nines as he watched him throw the dead blaster to the ground and rush forward with nothing but his fists. “You gotta put an end to-- _oof_ \--”

Nines tackled him, pinned him with his knees, and Poe slapped the lightsaber off and tossed it out of reach. An armored hand squeezed his neck, aiming to crush his windpipe in record time but he kicked up, knocked Nines off balance and they rolled, hitting and scratching at all the soft spots they could reach. Nines was intent on choking him--whenever his throat was clear, Poe tried to appeal to any iota of empathy Ren possibly had left.

“This isn’t the way to do this, you don’t have to make me try to kill him--I’ll--I’ll even talk with you, just end this--”

But he didn’t. Ren slowly strode closer and Poe’s view kept flipping as Nines fought him, got a solid grip on his neck this time, both hands, and his legs dug into the crooks of his elbows as he held him down. They had rolled near the ledge in their struggle, Poe’s flailing hand able to curl fingers to the underside of the steel, scorching hot every time they made contact--Nines pressed down harder and black dots were blinking in and out of his vision, growing and growing and growing and his muscles were screaming and his lungs were screaming and the center of his chest, the kriffing Force, it still burned. A last ditch effort, a jolt of the shoulders and knees to the stomach and he could breathe again--his own gasping rang in his ears but it went silent as soon as he saw Nines’ hand slip from the edge.

He didn’t scream until he hit the bottom and the fire swallowed him up.

“No.” Poe pushed himself back to the middle of the bridge. “No no no no…”

His lips were moving, he felt his tongue hit the back of his teeth and this throat vibrate with the words but there was nothing for him to hear: a vacuum enveloping his head, warm and stuffy like a blanket in the peak of summer, and he stumbled up to his feet still staring at the white-hot glob below where Nines had disappeared.

Kylo Ren beamed triumphantly from where he stood, growing closer, and he was saying something too, a whole string of things that strained the muscles in his neck and blew his mouth wide open against the smoke. But Poe couldn’t hear him, he still couldn’t hear him or his own thoughts as they screeched at too high of a pitch to discern; quietly at first, then overtaking the silence with a pressure right behind his eardrum.

His jaw clenched until it began to ache and one of his shaking arms managed to move far enough to swing behind him and then the hilt of the lightsaber was smacking against his palm, the green blade slicing through the air again. It hummed against his fingers and it felt right. This felt right. The center of his chest where the Force collected, it expanded against his ribcage and then to the rest of him until the boundaries of himself hovered inches above his skin.

The impact of his feet against the bridge as he ran jolted against his knees. Ren did this. Ren flicked lives away as casually as a piece of dust from his robes. And Ren was meeting him halfway, his own lightsaber drawn and lighting the edges of his feet.

The sound roared back when their blades crashed together and ground in a dangerous low static, nearly succeeding in drowning out their own shouting, the rush of the fire below them. The high-pitch tone still ringing in Poe’s head, pressing like his skull was going to crack with it.

Their lightsabers crossed between their faces, shining against the sweat and still Ren was grinning like he’d won, like he was still winning and would always win and in that moment, Poe had never hated anything more in his entire life.

Poe crunched his heel down on Ren’s foot, their blades separating and forcing Ren stumbling backwards, and in the half second Ren’s attention flitted down to the state of his toes, Poe thrust an empty hand forward. Fingers curling around an invisible sphere and the arm rising--Ren’s body flew up with it, ten feet between them. His arm started to shake, then his legs. More sweat slid into his eyes, and pushing his hand just an inch further sent Ren flying, crashing with a bounce and a skid against the rocks on the shore.

A spurt of magma flew into the air beside him as he shakily made his way back off the bridge. And another on the opposite side. And another. Above, the sun struggled through the black clouds, appearing for a brief moment before sliding away again, resembling a moon more than an actual star. And before him he held the lightsaber, turning the rocks at his feet green as he approached Ren, now stirring--sitting up, gently taking the lightsaber from his shaking, weak hands and sheathing it, tucking it back into his robes.

There was blood in his teeth, but it was still a smile he offered Poe once his eyes refocused. It was still triumphant.

“This was your first lesson,” Ren said. He touched one gloved finger to Poe’s breastplate, right where the glow still burned hotter than the air around them. “Now you’ve seen for yourself all the possibilities that come with the Dark Side.”

For a moment the silence closed around his ears again. And he could see the Force tree by his home during sunset on the brink of hell season, one of the golden leaves drifting to the ground, gripping at him all the way across the galaxy.

“It’s stronger in you than I anticipated. And it can get even stronger. See?” he said. “It’s growing even as we speak.”

His chest throbbed at the center where Ren’s finger still pointed, still dug.

On the way back to the shuttle, Poe thought of his mother. Surely there was something to say to her, or something for her to tell him at a moment like this, reaching across the gap of the dead--but there was nothing, not even his own thoughts, wiped blank by the ever-whining note in his ears and the sick churning that had started to sink into his stomach.

* * *

 

It only took five minutes from take-off at Carth’s hangar for Jessika and C3PO to descend into a petty argument and then another ten seconds for Rey to make some excuse up about checking some wiring to give her and Finn a chance to leave the cockpit. She’d harped on a sensitive topic, in retrospect--merely mentioning that BB-8 had never used such _language_ before R2-D2 had woken up--and Rey had to wonder if even the General and Master Luke had ever seen such a tirade from the droid.

“Do you think Threepio is trying to defend Artoo’s honor or something?” Finn asked as they settled into the seats around the holotable.

“I might’ve believed that if he didn’t go around insulting Artoo all the time himself,” she sighed.

Despite not having a rancor in the fight, Rey felt that she ought to thank C3PO later for letting her slip out into the more open parts of the ship. It wasn’t that Corulag had been too crowded for her to manage--claustrophobia had never been something she struggled with, having crawled into tight crevices and duct banks on scavenging runs on a regular basis. The throngs of people had simply been another factor to include in deciding on a strategy to navigate the whole ordeal, and staying together had seemed optimal, so of course she grabbed Jessika’s hand.

Only then did it become more difficult to breathe.

Once they arrived at her grandmother’s apartment, she thought maybe it would ebb--the tension was familiar, similar to the unplaceable odd frustration she’d contended with on Dantooine, but it had grown and leaked past the boundaries where it had stayed before. It did anything but ebb. And she liked Jessika well enough, wished now that she’d had more time to get to know her before this mission went awry, yet the feeling persisted.

Some part of her wondered if this was a part of the Force that Master Luke hadn’t gotten to yet in her training, that maybe the Force was able to amplify parts of her intuition that she hadn’t quite caught yet. The entire time they’d spent darting across the galaxy in search of Poe could have been a trap for all they knew; would it have been too outside the realm of possibility for Jessika to be a mole within the Resistance, feeding them bad intel about a star destroyer on Corulag? And then there was another part of her that grew hands just to grab this idea and shake it about-- _are you out of your mind, don’t be ridiculous._

But Finn was here. Finn would listen, as he always did.

“Can I ask you a question?” she said. “It’s going to sound stupid.” He snapped out of whatever daydream he’d had and leaned forward on the holotable, chin in hand. And it would have been jokingly earnest if it had been anyone else, but with him there wasn’t an ironic muscle in the entire gesture. “You know that feeling I was telling you about on Dantooine? How I thought I was frustrated about Jessika being here?”

“I do indeed remember that.”

“Well I’m fairly certain I’m not frustrated anymore, but the same feeling is still there, and I’m worried that the Force is trying to warn me about something--what are you smiling about?”

The smile wasn’t overt at all: he had pulled his lips in between his teeth in an effort to bite the corners down, keep them from ticking up, but parts of it extended up to his eyes and he might as well have been beaming, all teeth. “Rey…” he sighed, and there the grin was, pulling up to one side as he shook his head.

“What is it? I don’t get what’s supposed to be so funny.”

“You like her, don’t you?”

“Wh--of course I like her!” she said. “Were you even listening? That’s what I’m worried about--what if me liking her is blinding me to some other serious issue?”

“Stars, Rey.” He put his hand on top of hers on the table, looked right into her eyes after a deep breath that seemed to drag on forever as she waited for the follow up. “I mean you _like_ her.”

Was there supposed to be some new meaning in the way he said it this time? She thought for a moment, frowning, and met his gaze with something she assumed was close to a completely blank stare. “Um.”

“Kriff--okay,” he said, doubling down with the intensity like he always did when he tried to focus. “Have you ever thought about kissing her?”

_Kissing_ her?

She hadn’t--she hadn’t ever actually considered the possibility, kissing Jessika, and she assumed Finn meant on the mouth just by the look he was giving her. So she took a moment. She imagined kissing Jessika like she’d seen on the holovid dramas Finn and the other pilots had showed her: taking her face in her hands and pressing their lips together, slowly opening her mouth until--

_Oh._

“Your face is really red, Rey.”

“Shut _up_ , Finn.”

“I was right, though, wasn’t I?” he grinned. “You like her.”

“I don’t want to talk about it!”

“Okay, that’s fine.” He grinned at her again, bright and warm, and her irritation waned even as she maintained her scowl. “Anyway… I haven’t come up with any good ideas on a plan to infiltrate the star destroyer so I’m hoping you or Jessika have had a breakthrough…”

Rey shrugged. There had been ideas, seeds of plans ready to sprout into different viable avenues they could follow--and she had begun to trace the shoots with her finger, feeling for weaknesses that could foretell the whole thing unexpectedly withering beneath them. Chin in hand, she started again, thinking it through, but whenever it ran up on a step involving Jessika, the image of her in Rey’s head would smirk and her face would flush again.

She wondered how Jessika’s hands would feel crawling up the bare skin of her back--

“Y’know, I have an idea,” she said, and she could hear her voice lilting higher in pitch, much higher, and Finn raised an eyebrow. “Let’s you and I brainstorm together. Out loud.”

It helped to have another voice there with her--to keep the thread of everything focused on the task at hand but also to keep her grounded, away from the panic she had been sliding towards. Finn’s voice, calming the heartbeat pressing insistently against her breastbone, a constant in all the times they’d escaped narrow odds.

By the time C3PO joined them, Jessika grumbling in tow, not much headway had been made--any semblance of a strategy they could come up with relied wholly on being able to dock the Falcon in the destroyer’s hangar without being spotted, and trying to both locate a spare First Order shuttle and procure the access codes to land would take far too long. They couldn’t risk the ship slipping back into hiding.

“You’re running into the same problem I was having,” Jessika sighed as she slid onto the bench beside Rey.

That _feeling_ was back, like her heart had contracted mid-beat and had yet to let go.

“From what I’ve been able to overhear from the General and Statura and Ackbar since Starkiller,” she continued, “this star destroyer is the biggest thing they’ve seen out and about from them in ages. They were saying the Order could’ve retreated to the planets past the Unknown Regions where their whole operation started. If…” She sighed thickly, and it almost turned to a grumble. “If they take Poe out there, we--that’s not something we want to happen.”

“How close are we to Mustafar?” Finn asked.

“One star system over,” she said. “Got us stalled on an asteroid for now.”

“Which I advised against,” C3PO muttered. “For what it’s worth.”

“Not a whole lot, asshole.”

“Which I also disagree with, and you would understand if you would take one moment to listen to me!” C3PO slammed his red hand on the table, clanging much more loudly than expected judging by the way they all jumped. And from what stories Master Luke had told Rey about the droid during her training away from D’Qar, the outburst was extremely unlike him.

Jessika gnawed at the inside of her cheek for a moment before motioning for C3PO to say whatever he had to say, and Rey felt the urge to put her hand on Jessika’s knee--but hesitated. A finger twitched and then the mere idea of touching her sent her stomach lurching. She could offer support in other ways, ways that didn’t compromise her ability to be a useful member of their team.

“Firstly,” C3PO said, already back to his normal demeanor, “idling on this asteroid is ill-advised due to its size, as--um, _things_ have been known to live in them and I would much rather not contend with that again. Secondly, by my calculations this asteroid is just out of range to make a call to a private communicator on D’Qar, which we will need to do if you don’t want to die before even boarding the star destroyer.”

The pulse in the room was suddenly electric, the sense of depleted stores of hope swelling back up to their full potential in the silence that followed. And the General’s words echoed quietly in Rey’s head, an off-hand remark tossed her way after the situation room had cleared following a particularly unruly debriefing: _Threepio can be a real pain in the ass but there’s a reason we keep him around. There’s a reason he survived the war._

“All right then,” Jessika said. Her own communicator was already open in her hand. “How far do we need to go and who do we need to call?” 

Rey would have bet the small number of credits she’d amassed since leaving Jakku that this was the longest C3PO had spoken without anyone interrupting him once. He seemed to realize this as well, his voice growing more disbelieving bit by bit as he would pause, look between the three of them, and continue on with his explanation. It was almost endearing. _Almost_.

What the three of them hadn’t known--even Jessika--was that C3PO had been assisting a number of the analysts and techs in trying to revive and adapt nearly-lost technology from the Clone Wars for use against the First Order. Lieutenant Connix led the operations with occasional input from Admiral Ackbar, but they had made the most headway after R2-D2 had been revived and they could access his longer-reaching memory drives.

“The group of separatists that would become the Empire had this one weapon,” C3PO said, “and it would cut the power to a starship once it was hit. The Resistance obviously does not have unlimited resources, so Lieutenant Connix and Artoo were attempting to see if the settings in our fleet of ships could be adjusted to produce this effect. They had had one successful trial by the time I got roped into all of this mess.”

“So we need to call Kaydel,” Jessika sighed.

“I trust that’s not going to be a problem, Captain Pava?”

Even before Rey glanced over, she knew that the tone he took was going to push Jessika close to the edge of her patience. And her gut had been right: the walls around Jessika’s face had jumped up, leaving a cold stare and gritted teeth where there had been some semblance of warmth between them as the hours had worn on.

“It’s only going to be a kriffing problem if she doesn’t pick up my call.” She slid out of the seat and stormed past C3PO and towards the hall leading to the gunner post. “So let it go, rust bucket.”

Fifteen tense minutes later, Jessika reemerged from the hall, red in the face. “She picked up. It’s not a hard thing to do with this ancient piece of garbage, thank stars. Let’s get Poe back already.” She didn’t stop as she passed through the room and down to the cockpit, muttering under her breath in something that wasn’t Basic nor any of the other languages Rey had picked up on Jakku.

“Rey--really, this isn’t…” Finn started, and only then did she realize she was standing with one foot pointed at Jessika’s path.

“This isn’t what?” she said. “Going to be helpful? And sitting here on our hands is?”

As she maneuvered quietly toward the cockpit herself, she knew she was being unfair--one of the key pieces of advice on D’Qar _was_ steering clear of Jessika when she was upset, and Finn _was_ aware that she was maybe, _perhaps_ being motivated by intentions she was just now beginning to put words to and far from understanding. But while the ire brought a glow to Jessika’s face she found endearing rather than terrifying, Rey’s heart was prone to skipping three times as many beats when she smirked, half of her mouth turning up and pinching her face into a wink.

The number that it skipped when she found Jessika crouched down next to an open wall panel had to have been ten times higher than she was used to, and her hand reached up to worry at the neckline of her shirt. “I came to see if you needed any help,” she said quietly. “I’m pretty good with this stuff too, y’know.”

Jessika huffed and leaned back so she was sitting on her heels; her cheeks, dotted by a couple stray bits of grease, sat untugged by any sway of her moods. By Rey’s estimation, she didn’t even look angry anymore--the redness had receded, replaced by an odd warmth that needed a hue beyond the red to do it justice, an unseeable thing that tinged the deepest edges of the galaxy.

“Thanks.” Another sigh, a hand running across her face, smearing the grease into lighter gray smudges. “Hardest part’s done, though.” She took a couple of the wires between her fingers where the ends had been fastened together with a black plastic clip Rey had seen her readjusting in her hair back on Corulag.

“Well…” Rey sighed. “What’s next, then?”

Jessika stood up with a snort, shaking out her knees after they let loose a couple cracks. “Just getting the settings right on the dash.” She leaned over the passenger seat and shoved the wall panel shut with her foot--over her shoulder, Rey noticed a few of the blinking lights had changed their frequencies and a couple bright ones had lit up along the top for the first time. “I’d say we should test it, but there’s no way to know if it works until we’re staring that hangar in the face.”

“Right.” And she could sense some part of Finn urging her to dial it back a bit, considering that just minutes ago Jessika was on a _warpath_ , but this moment was nice. Just the two of them: no warpath or oblivious droids and the danger wasn’t so imminent that its breath was already hot against their necks. Jessika stretched, holding onto the chair for balance, her shirt pulled tightly against her back and drawing the thought from Rey’s throat--“Why didn’t you tell Lucia that Han was dead?”

She expected a shattering sound that didn’t come. What did: Jessika turning slowly, no signs of irritation, and shrugging. Shaking her head. Sinking into one of the second row seats with Rey mirroring her in the other. “Her dad and Solo went way back. And Solo was around a lot before they moved to Corulag. I’m not--someone better needs to tell them. They deserve that.”

“Why isn’t that better someone you?”

For a moment, Rey thought Jessika was going to answer, but as soon as she opened her mouth it fell shut again so she could worry at the corner of her lip. “I’ve tried to deliver news like that before,” she finally said. “It just got… messy.” The way she was staring at Rey was starting to--not hurt, no, but it was gathering towards something like it. “I’m never a rock when I need to be. Poe was. Poe could always--” And then she was staring back across the cockpit’s dashboard, right out to a smooth arc of stars brighter than those twinkling against the heavy backdrop.

“Well,” Rey said. “I’d say that you’ve been a plenty good rock during this whole ordeal.”

“That’s what _you_ think.”

“I know--it _is_ what I think!”

At last Jessika burst into a full-toothed grin before burying it into her hand, a lone bit of laughter growing until both hands were needed to muffle herself, and Rey couldn’t tell what she found so funny but it was contagious not only in how she caught it but also in how it seemingly wanted to perpetuate itself and spread until the pall of their looming mission retreated into the corners. Jessika would collect herself only to glance at Rey biting down on her fist and start up again, snorting, sending Rey into a new fit of giggles.

Her cheeks were aching once Finn and C3PO peeked their heads into the cockpit.

“Threepio, I think we missed something.”

“It would appear so. I haven’t heard laughter like that since Master Luke tripped and fell over Chewbacca’s son’s toys on Life Day.”

“It’s nothing, it’s nothing,” Rey said, catching her breath. Jessika had already gotten to her feet and moved to the pilot’s seat and motioned to the copilot seat with a shrug, and the small smirk she added before turning back to the controls sent Rey’s heart flipping again. “It’s ready to go, though. If you’re ready.”

“Yeah.” Finn gazed around at the rest of them. Gulped and nodded. “Yeah, let’s do this.”

They settled into their seats, Rey beside Jessika in the front with Finn behind her, C3PO opting to stand towards the back. His commentary was coming more infrequently, at least at a volume they could all understand, and she was half-ready to tell him to come sit in the empty seat, that Jessika wasn’t as angry about the mess with Kaydel as she had let on, not anymore. But that was probably better left buried where it lay.

“Okay.” Jessika had one hand on the controls and one on the arm of her seat, and the grip was so tense on both that they were starting to shake. “This thing can’t disable the whole star destroyer, it wasn’t designed for ships of that size--but if we come up on the underside of it and hit the section where the hangar is, their security protocol will go down with the power and we’ll be able to land. Thankfully the magnetic field on the entrance is powered by generators on another system so we won’t get sucked back into space after we get off the Falcon.”

In the distance, right where the horizon would have been had they been earthbound, Rey spotted another star, larger even than the arc Jessika had been eyeing earlier. It seemed smaller than the one left behind after Starkiller base was destroyed, a dimmer set of oranges burning in the emptiness--and before it, a speck. Furiously red and sparking like any other star in the galaxy.

The star destroyer was still there, and Poe with it. And others. She could sense it, a concept she still had not fully adjusted to even with Master Luke’s help; a queasy jolt rocked her stomach, and it was unclear whether it was her own or someone else’s echo. Poe’s. A misplaced sense of disgust climbed up her ribcage until she had to swallow back bile--no, this wasn’t hers. This was a hand extended into the ether, desperate for help and sore from the effort of trying to keep upright.

_We’re coming. We’re almost there._

“I mean…” Finn leaned up between their two seats, grimacing and holding his stomach. “When you say it like that, it doesn’t sound too hard.”

**********

It was.

The weapon was magnificently effective with Jessika’s aim and within half a minute of shooting off a couple rounds, the Falcon was docking in the destroyer’s hangar amid wildly scurrying astromech droids and a slew of TIE fighters off their storage tiers. But the element they had counted on with the main power outage--chaos, distraction, the stormtroopers and other security droids running into the center of the ship to assess the cause of the malfunction--was not as thoroughly spread as it had needed to be.

Leaving C3PO behind in the cockpit (much to his relief), Rey had led Jessika and Finn into the darkened hangar, steering clear as best she could of the patches of light streaming down from the couple lone emergency bulbs overhead. Blasters at the ready, fingers on the triggers twitching at the slightest of sounds while they ran toward the first exit they spotted, and then there was the gleam of white plastic at the corner of her eye--

“Hey--”

The firefight lasted all of fifteen seconds, not a difficult hurdle with how the sides were stacked but the notice the stormtroopers sent out had gone through their comms and down into every helmet of their peers and the waves of the alert crashed and crashed, roaring still as they ducked into a door leading to a main corridor and into a nook of a supply closet. More stormtroopers’ footsteps clacked outside, rhythmically in-step. They were in and had to hide from adversaries who knew to look for them and Rey’s hold on Poe through the Force had ebbed into something else. Away from the nausea, a numbed hollowness that pushed inward on her lungs and iced the tips of her fingers.

“That could’ve gone better,” Finn muttered.

“Not the time,” Jessika said. “You two have been on one of these things before. Where would he be?”

This wasn’t the Finalizer--but were all First Order star destroyers built with identical plans? Rey caught Finn’s eye and they exchanged frowns. The pressure of a ticking clock loomed, squeezing harder every time she reminded herself that they didn’t know how long they had until it hit zero. And Poe’s numbness continued to grow, but it tugged too, out of their hiding spot and to the left--

“I think we should head through those double doors on the left,” Finn said quickly. “I got a good feeling.” 

“Seconded,” Rey added, just as Jessika was about to raise hell about her doubts. “Left it is. Have to start somewhere.”

The corridor was abandoned when they stuck their heads out, even lacking the echo of footsteps, but their own feet were pressed into scrambling, threatening to trip over ankles while they darted to the doorway and Finn slapped a couple buttons on the access pad.

“What are you _doing_?” Rey hissed. “We don’t have all day!”

The door clanked open, just enough to put a hand through the crack. “I was doing _that_ , thank you very much,” he said. “The power outage fried most of the access pads too, okay?”

Jessika pushed forward to heave the doors the rest of the way open. “Can we please just keep moving? I keep re-realizing I’m on a First Order star destroyer and my hands are getting too sweaty for my blaster.”

Rey’s chest swelled in two different directions as she followed after her with Finn on her heels--endeared at Jessika’s particular brand of sardonic barbs coupled with the dread that it was masking something much more real.

But still they pressed on, able to scurry back around a corner until the stormtroopers passed, no shots fired, and each time they arrived at a fork, she and Finn could agree the route to take within seconds, their gut instincts working in tandem--with the current of the Force underneath the two of them in some respect, Rey imagined--and when they came to a hallway lined in white tiles that still glared brightly with the little bit of power the backup lamps afforded, Finn stopped dead in his tracks.

“I don’t think this is right,” he said quietly.

_This has to be right_ , Rey thought. Poe’s pull within her sense of the Force was stronger than ever, almost as if he were staring at her from the other end of the wing, the dense weight of his eyes landing on her shoulder, urging her to just turn around and _look_.

“You and Rey led us here on gut alone, and _now_ you think it isn’t right?” Jessika sighed.

“It’s just…” Finn turned back to both of them, trying to keep a wince off his face and failing. “This is a stormtrooper barracks.” He ran a hand over the blank space of a wall between two doors, finding a groove between the tiles and letting just his little finger trace the line. “Why would he be here?”

“You don’t know if he is, Finn, that’s what I’m saying!”

“No, he is,” Rey said. “He is absolutely here. And it’s not just my gut telling me.”

Finn glanced towards her, barely long enough for her to even offer him a small grin to ward off the waves of distress rolling off of him. “Second to last on the right, Rey? Is that what you’re getting too?” he murmured.

And she reached down and out, concentrated like Master Luke had taught her while the sea around them raged during a storm-- _concentrate_ , and she wouldn’t have to lose her balance and topple over on the rocks, and they wouldn’t be face-to-face with any stormtroopers off duty. _Concentrate_ \--the numbness was there along the right as Finn said, seeping under the tiny gap between the door and the floor at the second to last.

She nodded, and he nodded back. A couple levels above them where the power hadn’t been cut, sirens started to wail, filtering down to them in a whisper. They were running out of time.

“I don’t know exactly what you two are doing, but if this worked I do _not_ care,” Jessika muttered. Her blaster was tucked back into her belt, one hand tucked under her arm while the other was perched on her chin, letting her mouth at the scabs around her cuticles. As Finn went back to work on the bunk door’s access panel, Rey watched her from the corner of her eye, how her brow furrowed anxiously even as the rest of her face was set in a frown, how when she pulled her hand away from her mouth there was a speck of red at the corner of her nail she quickly licked away.

Rey rested a hand on her shoulder and Jessika was able to draw the hand down from her teeth, hesitantly lay it on top of Rey’s for a brief moment before pulling it back to finger the blaster again.

“We gotta be ready to move,” Jessika said, and he pushed open the door. “Oh stars.”

Relief washed over her in a flood at the sight of Poe on one of the cots--but the water rose too high and spilled into her lungs once she looked closer. He had never been a tall man, but he was smaller than he should have been, curled into himself, chin pressed against his chest. Glaring red burns dotted the back of his hands and the beginning of a black arc of a bruise stretched down across the bit of his neck she could see.

He was awake. She could sense that. He was awake and the door had opened and they had stepped inside and he hadn’t bothered to lift his head.

“Poe.” Finn stepped to the edge of the cot and kneeled to put himself at eye level, craning his head to put himself between Poe and whatever he was staring at. “Poe, it’s Finn. It’s Finn and Rey and Jessika. We’re getting you out of here.” He laid his hand on Poe’s shoulder and still he didn’t move. “Hey, c’mon,” he said, quieter this time, and his voice was starting to crack. “There’s no way this thing can be more comfortable than what you have on D’Qar, right?”

In all their planning, they had never accounted for the uncomfortable middle ground: infiltrating the star destroyer to find Poe alive but still being too late. The last vestiges of her hope were dwindling, and Jessika’s too, it seemed--her hands were cupped around her mouth, eyes closed, denying. _This isn’t happening_. _This can’t be happening this way._

Finn’s hand moved from Poe’s shoulder to his face, hesitating at first, then gently brushing a couple stray curls from his brow. They would flop back almost immediately, but he kept brushing them back anyway, a soft motion to keep his hand busy. “Poe Dameron, I need a pilot.”

She half expected Jessika to roll her eyes, mutter something about how he already had two--but she didn’t, pulling her hands down low enough to peek over the tips of her fingers as Poe’s face screwed up into a grimace to squint up at Finn, then over to the two of them.

“What…”

“Yeah, man. Yeah,” Finn said. His grin was ready to split his face in two even if it didn’t reach his eyes. “We’re going home.”

The smile that Poe offered him was weak but present and that was all he needed to see before he had an arm around him, hoisting him up slowly to a sitting position. “A pilot,” Poe said slowly. “I don’t…"

Rey’s stomach heaved and it took all her willpower to keep it from clenching any further around the meager scraps of food left on the Falcon--just another reason to add to the list of why they couldn’t afford to drag their feet. Poe needed medical attention and it was starting to infect the air around them so much that even Jessika was starting to look green.

“You don’t what?” Finn said. He kept his face close to Poe’s as he held him upright, shooting a look at Rey and Jessika. They ran over and Jessika lodged her shoulder under Poe’s other arm, and she and Finn were able to pull him up to his feet.

Before the three of them, Rey tried to catch Poe’s gaze. He was staring just past her ear, eyes halfway to glassy but desperately pulling back at the same time, wanting to stay focused, and she could give him something to focus on as they trudged back into the barrack’s corridor. “It’s not that far, and then you can lie down again,” she said.

But he was turning into deadweight as his knees considered buckling with increasing frequency, and the sirens on the next level up were only getting louder, meshing with those that had switched back on as the power was restored, and they didn’t have time--

_The Force helped us find him, so it could help ease his pain on the leg back, in theory_ \--she put a finger to his temple and willed his thoughts to quiet from the frothing roar but Poe winced, hissed. Yanked his head away.

“ _Stop_ ,” he muttered. “I don’t want anything to do with it, no--”

“Not a good idea right now, Rey,” Jessika said. “We got him. You go make sure anyone that’s trying to get in our way won’t be, all right?”

Swallowing the lump in her throat, she ran to the doorway to check their surroundings--still empty, but the air felt thicker from the noises clunking past the walls, stormtroopers or droids or otherwise she couldn’t tell, not when Poe’s distress was growing louder and louder.

_Focus. Focus._

She could only think in a series of actions: hand on her blaster, then the lightsaber. Motioning them to follow her, retracing steps. Finn calling out which path to take when everything her head swelled to a deafening fuzz. Poe clawing away at something in his head and also in the whole of him until the undersides of the fingernails were smeared with red.

“They… sent you after me?”

“Well,” Finn said. “Kind of!”

“Why...?”

“Don’t you make me lecture you in the middle of this kriffing star destroyer, Poe Dameron,” Jessika growled. “I don’t like repeating myself.”

The star destroyer had to have grown in the time it took them to get to the barracks because Rey would have remembered the way in taking this long; maybe they had taken a couple wrong turns, had dived further into the belly of the First Order and were about to round the corner into a collection of officers or Kylo Ren himself, lightsaber out and flickering.

Or maybe they hadn’t. Maybe the halls were really this empty--slowly she began to recognize some of the walls, ones with a couple loose wires sticking out between the finishes or the propaganda poster with the folded-down corner. The lights were clicking back on one by one, overtaking them and brightening the path she then knew would lead to the hangar. It was _too easy_.

“Rey,” Finn called. “Through those doors on the right--hey, Poe, come on, it’s just a little further, okay--”

When she pushed open the doors, they slammed back against the wall and the echo swam in the cavernous space. It appeared deeper now that the lighting system was back online, glistening off the windows of the air control room, the TIE fighter engines, the wildly waving brass protocol droid in the Falcon’s cockpit--

“Get him inside, I’ll cover you,” Rey said. She put her back close to Poe’s as they shuffled across the open space that was wider than necessary--it was always going to be too wide, she realized, but now it was an expanse with far too many opportunities for their luck to run out.

This couldn’t have been luck. Luck didn’t sit like this in her gut. Finding that one piece from an AT-ST fan belt when she was twelve had been luck. Poe still being alive, that was another likely candidate. But there were eyes on them now, hidden, and the nausea she had been picking up from Poe was tinged with a different color from the combined weight of their gazes.

“That really such a good idea?” Finn asked over his shoulder. “Having that thing out so close to us?”

“What?” She looked down at her right hand, and she had pulled out the lightsaber without even realizing. Her thumb was hovering above the button to unsheath it. “I’ll keep my distance if it’s on. Just worry about him--”

Above them there were two bursts of screaming green, showering into sparks just ahead of them as the blasts hit the front edge of the Falcon. They froze, ducked down with a shout, waited. A few more late fritzes fell to the ground and cooled at their feet, and the silence that followed was the smothering kind, pushing into their tense muscles until they were about to knock together shaking from the pressure. And Rey almost thought that could be a welcoming sound, however useless it would be--if only to disrupt the quiet.

They didn’t come this far to accept useless.

She slid a few extra inches away from the others before turning on the lightsaber. Finn jumped slightly as the hum filled the room, or maybe it was Poe reacting and pulling Finn along with him--she couldn’t tell exactly with her back to them, nor could she risk turning to check if they were all right. A tinge of relief spread across her shoulders as she heard Jessika murmuring to them, and Rey then focused her attention on the source of the blaster fire.

It didn’t take long: the pulses of living beings within the Force were so glaringly obvious when they were spread out and had heartbeats rocketing along the insides of their wrists.

“The TIE fighters,” she said.

“What?” Jessika hissed.

“We didn’t see anyone on our way back because they hid in the docked TIE fighters.”

“Which one did that last shot come from?”

“I don’t know, that’s what I’m trying to--”

And then the air around them was lit with green, most of the shots sending equipment crashing into walls, leaving spurts of smoke along the dented sides of their ship--half the damage it could be, Rey repeated to herself, half the damage it could be if her aim slipped. If her new and tenuous grasp on the Force faltered before she could deflect a shot away from Finn and Jessika as they hurried to haul Poe aboard the Falcon.

“Rey, _come on!_ ” Finn shouted. Presumably they had reached the ramp up to the cabin. Or they were close.

The TIE fighter fire didn’t stop.

“Get him on board and get the ship ready to go!”

Another shot deflected. And another. And another. One sent flying back into the fleet’s maintenance tubing, one setting a stash of extra life support vests on fire. The shots weren’t hitting her and they weren’t hitting the others and they weren’t hitting crucial parts of the Falcon but they weren’t even starting to _slow_. Occasionally, just occasionally, one shot would fly back from her saber and into one of the many ships’ ion engines. Enough to ground it, but not enough to stop its attacks.

Then Jessika calling from the ramp: “REY--"

The cockpit of a TIE fighter along the wall before her exploded almost from the inside out, then another a couple rows down. Red blasts. A familiar engine screech in the distance--

X-wings--

Outside the hangar--

“Come on, we gotta go!” Jessika yelled.

She ran, green blaster fire chasing her heels even as the ramp closed up behind her into the muted quiet of the ship. Her sheathed saber dropped into its holster at her hip as Jessika grabbed her wrist--her pumping heart getting an unneeded extra rush--and pulled her along to the cockpit.

She got one brief look at Finn kneeling beside Poe sprawled on the seat carved out of the cabin wall--but Jessika pulled her onwards, already talking quickly to C3PO and turning every needed knob with her free hand.

“Kriffing hell, we are getting back to D’Qar,” she said. “We’re going--oh!” She looked down at her hand around Rey’s wrist. Dropped it like a bolt fresh from a hot engine. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to, uh…”

Rey wanted to reassure her that no, it was fine, she could really hold her wrist or her hand any time she wanted; but her breath was still coming heavy and rushing loudly in her ears, and by the time she could get the words to the tip of her tongue, Jessika’s head had ducked, attention diverted back to the droid.

“Open up the comm links, Threepio!”

“Yes, Captain Pava, right away.”

Another TIE fighter rode into the air on a fireball before crashing back down, and Jessika grinned as she settled into the pilot’s seat. “All right, let’s get out of here.”

No blaster fire followed them as they flew from the hangar, twisting down and out after a couple lone specks of gray metal in the distance.

“You!” Jessika jumped up from her seat and leaped again to C3PO, grabbing his head and pressing a loud and sloppy kiss to his forehead. “You are the unsung hero of the Resistance!”

“Captain Pava,” C3PO said slowly. “While I appreciate your gratitude, I must ask if you are feeling all right as this is still rather unusual--”

“Blue Three, you might not live this down.” The voice crackled from the comms speaker and was poorly stifling a laugh. “Plus arguably owing a life debt to a protocol droid?”

The mirth faded from Jessika’s face within half a second. “Can it, Snap. We would’ve still made it back even if Threepio hadn’t called back to base for help. You didn’t see Rey back there.”

Rey’s cheeks burned so hot that it immediately reminded her of the surface of Mustafar. 

“Anyway, you got Doctor Kalonia on call for when we get back?” Jessika sighed. 

“...how is he?” Snap asked quietly. 

“Just make sure she’s on the tarmac, okay?” She paused, ran both hands over her face before continuing, “And you and Nien Nunb cut the shit on the way back. I know we’re going to get enough of it from the General when we land to last us a long lifetime.”

He signed off and she shuffled back to sink into the pilot chair, slowly pressing the sequence of buttons to jump into hyperspace after the X-wings. Even amid the air of celebration, the relief that Poe had been rescued from the First Order alive ( _again_ ), something wasn’t sitting right. Something, in the undercurrent of the galaxy, still seeped enough poison into the fabric of it all to send their thoughts spiraling into an endless depth of worry. Senseless worry mingling with the explainable sort until it all grew into a shape no one would have words for.

“Okay,” Jessika murmured. “It’s time to go home.”

* * *

 

Poe had hazily asked Finn to sit with him on the inset bench, apparently unaware that his entire body was stretched across it. His left foot hung off the edge towards the end, but the rest was a tangled flop of limbs, and after a couple moments’ difficulty, Finn secured a seat for himself with Poe’s head resting at the cross of his ankles. 

Poe had passed out almost instantly. Not even the lurch into hyperspace jolted him awake. 

“You’re going to be okay,” he whispered, a hand resting just above the curls that laid against his forehead. 

Because the world in which the opposite was true wasn’t a world Finn thought he could manage, so he refused to entertain the idea. 

His fingers twisted around a couple more locks of Poe’s hair, rubbed softly against his scalp. The scar under his eye had faded to a pale pink but so much of the color had drained from his face that it had deepened to red again. Red and angry. 

_You were going to take me to Dantooine and Yavin 4 when you got back. I wish I knew what my home world was so I could take you there instead. We could learn everything there is to know about it together._

The corners of his eyes stung and his chest was swelling hotly from the inside out, pressing against his ribcage--just from the thought. The _thought_. Himself and Poe Dameron, snatched back from the edge again, standing on the cusp of an unknown village, an alternate history’s version of home.

But this history, the one life he had to live here and now, home stood so long as an idea stolen before he could remember it. An idea that he had to rebuild for himself as soon as the uniform helmet fell from his fingers on Jakku. An idea that had solidified before his eyes in the shape of so many people on D’Qar but the center of the orbit always fell back to Poe. It fell back to the confident quirk of Poe’s eyebrow in the closet of the Finalizer as they planned the escape and the whirlwind of everything after. And when Finn looked down at Poe’s battered sleeping face in his lap and focused on the swelling that was starting to scald his lungs and the blood pumping through his heart, he finally understood Slip’s hushed whispers in the night on what it was to fall in love, how it felt so much like returning home.


	2. Chapter 2

When Doctor Kalonia met the Millennium Falcon on the tarmac and swept him into the base, Poe was eager to sink into the familiar lumpy mattresses that populated the med bay and sleep as long as his body would allow.

And he wasn’t the usual bone-tired that warranted that stretch of unconsciousness, but he wouldn’t let himself dwell on certain matters until he was given the chance to process them, and processing wasn’t something he was keen to attempt alone anymore.

Kalonia checked his vitals, smoothed bacta patches over the burns on his hands, and his vision began to spot before she disappeared around the corner.

He didn’t dream.

Kalonia wasn’t there when he stirred. Nor were the medical droids, any other beds. The markings along the hallway outside the room designated this as Cresh Wing, a part of the base the Resistance had never grown large enough to need.

Luke had sensed it when they had landed, probably. The General, too. The spore that had buried itself deep inside him and sprouted into a silhouette of something they didn’t need a reminder of.

_This isn’t who I’m supposed to be--_

A vial of unopened antidote burst on the table at the foot of his cot, glass shards following the rivulets to the floor. His heart rate monitor screamed in his ear. Moments later, Kalonia arrived at the scene, breathless, and Poe unclenched his fists-- _when had they closed?_ \-- and found half-moons of barely-broken skin in his palm.

“‘M sorry,” he mumbled. She didn’t reply, just swept the worst of the mess into an old dustbin and felt his forehead with a tight frown.

He slept again after she left, the image of his mother’s face burned into the back of his eyelids as he drifted off.

He still didn’t dream.

* * *

 

The situation room was not a room that was meant to remain near-empty: it operated on two planes, the abandoned and the uncomfortably crowded, and anything else was an intrusion. Show up with less than ten people and the walls glared until the jitters grew too much and you were forced to leave.

There were only four of them there now, and if the walls were glaring, Finn considered it poor competition to the sight of the General.

She had brought them here, him and Rey and Jessika, not even an hour after Poe had been settled in his secluded med bay, and even then she had taken to glowering at them for what was going on ten full minutes. Arms crossed. New lines creasing between the old along her brow.

Palpable worry was threading between the three of them but the tighter it was strung, the more he realized it wasn’t directed at the point before them. The hum of the plucked string resonated with the low chorus of the medical equipment and followed the beat kept by the the undercurrent of slumbering breathing.

“If this were the New Republic fleet…” the General started suddenly, and they all jumped in their seats. “If this were the New Republic fleet, this would be possible grounds for a discharge. You went against my _direct orders_ , took a key intelligence officer against his will, and--most importantly--carried out this unauthorized mission knowing your absence could put the lives of the entire Resistance at risk.”

The General seemed to zero in on Jessika, waiting for her to mutter some snide remark about C3PO being designated as an intelligence officer of all things--though Finn may have simply been projecting. The General could have been zeroing in on any one of them in hopes that she could cut the speech short if they prostrated themselves appropriately.

But they didn’t, so the General rolled her eyes and continued: “You knew leaving D’Qar that the First Order had a heavy presence around Geonosis, yet--as Threepio told me moments ago--even when you realized that they had staked out Dantooine and Mustafar, meaning that our intelligence here was lacking, _still_ you did not think to alert us here of our error in judgment. This was reckless, poorly planned, and had the First Order known the full extent of our handicap, there might not have been much to come back to.”

She paused again. A few lone strands of iron-gray hair had pulled loose of the otherwise immaculate bun, and she didn’t bother to remove her hands from her hips to put it back behind her ear; but nor was she about to ruin the stern image she had cultivated over the past few minutes by blowing it to the side.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Rey raise her hand and panic clutched around his throat in a vice. _Oh, Rey, this is definitely not the time--_

“General Organa,” she said slowly. “I understand the points that you’ve made, but I’ve been wondering… if us leaving D’Qar had endangered the Resistance, why were Snap and Nien Nunb allowed to help us escape Mustafar?”

Rey had brought this up on the short hyperspace jump back to the Ileenium system--it had been a subject of noisy debate, clearly audible from the cockpit even at his spot further inside the ship with Poe, and Rey was adamant that the two of them had acted on their own. Jessika was less than convinced, and C3PO merely wanted them to talk a little more quietly after all that excitement.

(Which he could sympathize with--Poe had only been asleep for a few minutes by the time they started up, and he wanted to keep the pain from his weary face as long as he could. Or at least the worst of it. Even unconscious with Finn’s fingers tracing his face along the hairline, there was a pinched quality to his face, as if he were wincing and turning away from a sharp but invisible pain.)

He half expected the General to deliver another round of reprimands, but the tense hold in her shoulders softened and the sigh that followed was anything but frustrated. “Because Threepio had said you found him,” she murmured. “Despite everything. And because Luke and I--” Her hand came to the collar of her shirt, worried at the corner of it, rolling it between her thumb and first finger. “I didn’t want to leave Poe on Dantooine, you know.”

“You mean _abandon_ him?” Jessika muttered.

“Pava, please,” she snapped. “I was trying to do what was best for the other hundred people who live on this base. But--” She squeezed her eyes shut, and when she reopened them, they fell upon Jessika almost maternally. “I can’t say that I wasn’t relieved when the call came in that you’d found him. The damage had been done, and you’d gotten so far. I…”

 _Had just needed an excuse to do what you wanted to in the first place_ , Finn finished in his head, and she caught his eye with a grim grin as if she’d heard him.

He found that he could only manage to half-listen to the rest of her speech: on the surface, it was still an official reprimand, complete with threats of extra cleaning and maintenance duties as punishment, but those never came to fruition. She leaned in that direction only to shift back to the opposite pole where she hinted at how grateful she was that someone had gone against orders under the guise of _don’t do it again_.

“I know you’ll want to see him,” she said, “but, um… Doctor Kalonia believes in her professional opinion”--with pointed looks at each of them in turn--“that he shouldn’t have visitors for now. There’s more that we--she needs to assess. Understood?”

They nodded, mumbled that yes, they understood, though Finn couldn’t keep his thoughts from flying across his face. He had never heard of anyone needing to be put in isolation after a mission--there apparently had been a quarantine on the last planet the Resistance had been based on during an outbreak of a native virus, but Poe hadn’t looked _sick_ , not like that. If there was something more the General wasn’t telling them, he wanted to find out, if only to keep the vast expanses of unknowns from escalating his worry into something entirely unmanageable.

“Finn, are you listening?”

He looked back up--the General had left, and Rey and Jessika were already halfway to the door themselves.

“Wh--sorry.”

“I said,” Rey repeated, “the rest of the pilots are outside playing a game of pick-up of--what was the game?”

“Grav-ball,” Jessika said. “They’re actually awful at it, so even if you didn’t want to play, it would still be great entertainment.”

They grinned hopefully at him, but he shook his head. “I think I’m going to go see if there’s any caf left in the cafeteria.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, positive.” Their own grins were starting to waver so he pulled a smile on to try to reassure them. “Go on, I’m fine.”

He waited a few minutes after they left before wandering into the halls himself--it looked as if most of the base had gone outside for the game with a couple analysts and techs left to man the posts in their absence. A quick pop in the cafeteria revealed that nothing from breakfast had survived to that late in the day, much less the precious caf--not that he had actually wanted some anyway. But he still wanted to check in case they asked.

There wasn’t anywhere else on base he could think to go after the cafeteria besides the med bay, even despite the General’s notice. It was a large enough room at the end of Aurek Wing, and he could make the case to Kalonia that he just wanted to get a look at him. He didn’t need to be by Poe’s bedside and Poe didn’t even need to know that he was there. Just to know if he was starting to look better than how they found him in the barracks would be enough.

The route he took there was indirect, weaving in and out of the halls of bunks and tech rooms; as much as he wanted to see Poe-- _needed_ to, even--there was still the nagging thought that had been screaming in the back of his head since they boarded the Falcon safely and his heartrate still hadn’t slowed. _I’m in love with Poe Dameron and I don’t even know what exactly that means_. Slip had whispered to him about it at length: the stormtrooper in the FZ corps based on the other side of the Finalizer that he’d been paired with for cleaning duty once when FN-8856 had been sent for reeducation, how after that shift they snuck out during meals to supply closets and storage rooms.

“We don’t always… _y’know_ ,” Slip murmured the second night he had spoken to Finn about it. “Sometimes we just talk. They want to fly a TIE fighter one day. Lead a squadron in a fight against the Resistance. And under their armor they wear a bracelet they wove from stray fibers they picked up during laundry duty.” He had sighed, and in the dark Finn had seen the clear glint of an open-mouthed smile. “It’s nothing like I’ve ever felt before.”

Slip wasn’t the first stormtrooper to carry on relations like that, but he was the first to talk so openly with Finn about it, the first to admitting it was something more than the impersonal graphic bits Nines and Zeros shared in the rations line. Even after Finn had pretended to fall asleep, Slip had gone on about the FZ stormtrooper, how kissing should have been gross, pressing your mouth to someone else’s, but to him it had been the most wonderful thing in the galaxy.

“I don’t know if I believe you,” he’d said.

“Eighty-Seven, you just haven’t found your person,” Slip had sighed.

For the first time in recent memory, Finn wished that he could share another moment like that with Slip, just to see what he would say.

It had seemed easy enough with Rey when he guessed that she was falling for Jessika. _Oh you like her,_ because it fit with everything he’d seen with Slip. The blushing, especially. In the scorching Jakku sun, he had still never seen Rey’s face so red.

But Poe--

He thought about kissing him, the stubble grating against his cheek. How the draft that leaked through their room at night wouldn’t chill him straight to the bone if Poe’s body was wrapped around him, his breath even and hot on the nape of his neck. How the idea of forever had been terrifying in the First Order, but finding his groggy face in their bunk every morning stretching against a yawn made the stack-up of years seem like a welcome challenge. An easy feat.

Poe had to recover first.

He stopped at the intersection of the Aurek Wing bunk and the corridor leading to the med bay, hiding behind the corner. Kalonia’s voice echoed down the hall, spouting medical terminology he couldn’t decipher, but he could see the General and Skywalker standing just past the doorway, arms folded into themselves and thrumming with pessimistic energy.

“All of his physical injuries will heal within thirty-six hours, but I can’t speak to what else is ailing him--”

“You said he broke a glass vial?” the General said.

“There’s no indication in his vital signs that he had been able to stand to even get to it,” Kalonia said. “I don’t know--”

“How was his heartrate?” Skywalker asked.

“Elevated, but--”

“Okay,” he said. He turned to the General, laid a hand gently on the crook of her elbow. “I need to go talk to him.”

“Luke.” Finn watched as the General covered Skywalker’s hand with her own, stared at him with a look that would have terrified even Poe and Snap three times over. “I can’t have this happen again. He’s not my own flesh and blood, but Shara--”

“I know, Leia. I know.” Skywalker ran a hand along his beard. “How do I get to Cresh Wing from here?”

Whatever directions they gave him would lead straight past where Finn stood--quickly he looked around for a nearby closet, even an alcove, but aside from the locked bunk doors there was no place to duck into without being spotted. Not that he wasn’t allowed to be there, but when his own bunk was on the other side of the wing, excuses for being close enough to eavesdrop didn’t come easily.

So he ran: back up the long stretch of the bunk corridor, turning away from the hall that would lead to the base’s other wings, and finally moseying with his back to where Skywalker would eventually appear. But being out of breath from the sprint wouldn’t convince even C3PO that nothing was afoot, much less the last Jedi--and as much as he wanted to trail Skywalker to Poe’s isolation wing, sneaking undetected to Cresh Wing was more than he anticipated.

The end of the hall led to the field behind the base, and through the glass of the door he could spy a ball flying through the air, followed immediately by Iolo and Nien Nunb tripping over each other chasing after it. Possibly great entertainment as Jessika had described, but definitely an ample distraction.

His stomach was starting to sink further than he had thought possible as he made his way to the door: past his hips and collecting in his ankles until it felt disconnected from his body completely, pooling on the ground and leaving a hollow gap where it once sat.

Finn wondered why Slip had never spoken about this side of love, if he had never pulled it up to glance at its underbelly or if, in ignoring it, tried to convince himself it did not exist. He would have appreciated the notice.

* * *

 

Poe knew someone else was in the room before he opened his eyes--it wasn’t Kalonia, that much was certain, but he felt his whole body seize as the concentration of the Force in his chest grew hot and twisted again into that single thread searching for a connection. He tried to will it back before it latched onto whoever had come to his bedside, but the pull was too strong, almost as if the other were gently coaxing it forward. 

It was far stronger than Ren’s had been and hummed on a separate frequency, a calmer one. But his muscles still tensed.

“It’s been a busy couple of weeks since I got back with Rey, so I apologize for not coming to talk with you sooner and… under better circumstances.”

He pulled open his eyes and turned towards the voice--Luke was sitting in one of the wing’s dingy plastic chairs, arms folded across his chest less like he was frustrated than he simply needed a place to put them.

“It’s been a long time since we’ve seen each other,” Luke said.

Twenty-four years and a funeral ago. Craning his neck to get a better view of the faces who smiled sadly at him, who greeted him so familiarly even though he couldn’t remember them. Or begin to try to as the pyre’s smoke clouded the air around the house.

“We used to come by Yavin more often when you were a toddler, Leia and I. I don’t know if you knew that.” And he kept pausing like he was waiting for Poe to jump in and respond to some questions he was avoiding asking outright. “You looked so much like Kes then. Now, though--I thought she was exaggerating when Leia said you look exactly like your mother, but I was wrong.”

_Stop._

“Heard you fly just like her too--”

_STOP._

The cart on the other side of his bed flew across the room until it crashed into the wall, the whole set of scanners and instruments falling to the ground.

“Poe… _Poe_ ,” he said again, softly and almost at a whisper. “Look at me.”

He wouldn’t, not when he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the mess of the cart correcting itself, each device floating back to its proper place. Not when if he turned, he would see Luke’s hand guiding them there.

“When I gave your mother part of the Force tree, we had no idea it could generate Force sensitivity. This wasn’t meant to be a surprise, but it’s not something to be ashamed of either.”

“Isn’t it?”

Poe turned back toward Luke but wouldn’t look him in the eye; he focused on anything else on his body that he could find, his shoulder, the line of his graying beard, the particular pinch of his brow as it furrowed at his words. It didn’t stay fixed on any one point for long.

“Poe.”

“I’m not my mother, that much is obvious now.”

“What do you mean?”

This hadn’t been the plan--Luke was supposed to have sighed heavily at his unresponsiveness, left him alone after a couple minutes prying at him in vain to open up. But, as always, the galaxy had other ideas and he would simply have to ride along.

“You can sense it, right?” he said. “How it’s--”

He couldn’t bring himself to say it.

_The Dark Side._

His mother had told him about the Dark Side--a side effect of being asked to repeat the story about the Massassi so many times, he later guessed, as she was trying to keep it from growing stale. The Sith of more recent years weren’t the same that had conquered their moon so long ago but they still held the name and all the associations it had drawn over the millennia--

_They used the Force and fought with lightsabers._

_Like the Jedi?_

_Sort of, Poe._ And here she would pick him up, balance him on her hip, and point to a spot in the front yard where the shadow of a tree darkened the grass. _The Jedi use the Light Side of the Force, but the Sith--_

_Do they use the Dark Side?_

_Yes. You can’t be a Jedi and use the Dark Side. It corrupts people. That’s why the Sith were evil._

_It’s why you and Pa fought them!_

_The Empire was fueled by the Dark Side, yes…_

There were only a handful of his mother’s expressions that had permanently etched themselves in his memory, so many lost to the indiscriminate pruning of aging, and the sad, wistful curve of her mouth--how it reached up to the corners of her eyes--was something he was still unable to completely decipher.

He’d often wished there were a way to ask her what she’d been thinking of in that moment, but now there was nothing he wanted less than for her to see him like this.

“The stories,” Poe said slowly, and Luke was watching him work through his words with a cool sense of patience. “The stories said you can’t come back from it if you start down that path.”

“I wouldn’t say that’s true at all.” He reached his hand out toward Poe’s, hovering in case he wanted to pull away. After a moment, it rested carefully there, Luke’s palm worn and weathered. “I’ve seen enough evidence with my own eyes that proves those stories wrong.”

“Okay.”

“You don’t believe me?”

He opened his mouth to answer only to realize that he had none. Or: not anything succinct or close to comprehensible. Ever since Mustafar the connection with the Force within him had started to writhe, fighting for his attention and screeching louder in his head when it didn’t win. He couldn’t think straight, couldn’t keep the tension from boiling over and breaking something at increasingly regular intervals--and he couldn’t get himself to _stop_. All of Admiral Ackbar’s deep breathing and meditation exercises, thought to be failsafe, were suddenly useless. No amount of sleeping could stem the progress. _It’s not that I don’t believe it’s possible; I don’t know if it’s_ me _it would be possible with._ A hot flash of anger lit up the sides of his neck and behind his ears--couldn’t Luke feel that? How Poe’s grip on himself kept slipping and slipping?

“You’re a good man, Poe,” Luke said. “You’re not a lost cause.”

The flash spread down to his cheeks--he could feel the flushing, and suddenly Luke’s hand flew up. The cart was halfway to tipping over, the equipment pressed to one side, and he was holding it in its place balanced perfectly on two wheels.

“You are not,” Luke repeated slowly as the cart returned back to level, “a lost cause.”

The Force was pushing back against Poe’s attempts to quiet it, drowning out his thoughts not into a screech this time, but a low dark fuzz that reminded him of the vacuum of space.

“I should probably let you rest,” he murmured, standing and heading towards the hall. “And--I know the doctor wanted to limit your visitors, but I’m pretty sure Finn was about to try to follow me here just now. Do you want me to ask him to come see you? I won’t tell anyone.”

Finn--cradling his head the entire flight back to D’Qar with fingers in his hair, kind and soft and a thousand other things Poe couldn’t find in himself anymore.

“No,” he said. “Not now.”

After Luke disappeared around the corner, he willed himself back to sleep, this time hoping for a dreamless expanse of nothingness--

The scene was quick. His hands, clad in black stormtrooper gloves, on the controls of an old model TIE fighter. An A-wing emblazoned with a green number 4 whining up behind him. And in half a second: a jolt, sudden heat his back as the fire overtook the cabin in slow motion and crawled up his arms and picked at the glass keeping the air in his lungs. Half a second in the moment he feared, when he knew he was going to die and could do nothing but watch himself burn.

* * *

 

Halfway through the first octet of the game, Jessika gave up completely on trying to explain what was happening or why Snap and Tabala were arguing about _another_ alleged foul Statura had missed in his refereeing. The teams were fairly well-matched in their incompetencies, however, so any explanation would have only gone so far. 

“There was a time when we were allowed to play tackle,” she said after Karé placed two rough hands on Nien Nunb’s back to stop the play. “And then the General came back from a diplomatic mission and found half the base in the med bay with broken bones.”

Rey grimaced but kept her eyes on the field--most of the grass had been worn away from previous games, and as the next play started, dust clouds started to puff into the air where the soles of their shoes dug in. Iolo snapped the ball back to Karé and she slid deftly between Tabala and one of the newer analysts without a finger laying on her. She was quick on her feet, quicker even than Bastian, and made it almost to the net before Nien Nunb barrelled in from right field. He failed to stop with enough room and slammed into her, shoulder first, the ball soaring into the air and rolling to a stop at Statura’s feet.

“ _Buddy_ ,” Statura sighed. “That’s the fifth time this month. General’s rules--you got a red card.”

Jessika still hadn’t managed to master Nien Nunb’s language, but the tone of voice indicated he was probably cursing Statura to Hoth and back as he stomped off the field.

“Red card?” Rey asked.

“He’s suspended for the rest of the game.” Jessika pointed beyond Rey to Bastian and Karé as they conferred in a huddle with their respective teammates. “Which gives Snap’s team a huge advantage because Bastian, Karé, and Nien Nunb are the only ones who even know what they’re doing.”

“Why do they care so much though?” She turned to Jessika in earnest, a confused grin lighting up her face--a real grin at that, not any of the forced ones she’d seen since leaving Finn in the situation room. “It doesn’t really matter if they win or lose.”

“Did they not have competitive sports on Jakku?”

“ _Well,_ ” she said. “Didn’t really have much of anything on Jakku.”

“Fair point.” She bit back a question about if sabacc had made it to Jakku, filed it away for a later date when the sun hit Rey’s eyes at just the right angle to make her brain fizzle out of ideas. “If I had to guess, I would say it’s something to keep their mind off everything else that goes on here.” Though sometimes--and it didn’t feel like the right time to mention it now, all things considered--not even a game of illicit tackle grav-ball could do that. Rey hadn’t been on D’Qar when the base held the first match after Starkiller: Bastian meeting Statura at centerfield for the coin toss only for everyone to remember that Ello had been killed. That the other team needed a new captain.

If anything, the distraction element was why Snap was so ready to jump Statura every time he missed a foul--his knuckles could only go so white until something else had to give.

By the time they turned their attention back to the game, Snap’s team had already scored a goal, and the timer one of the astromechs was projecting was ticking closer to the last moments of the octet. “That’s why they’re playing _now_ , isn’t it?” Rey said.

“Yeah,” she sighed. “No news from the med bay doesn’t have a history of turning out well. There was one time--ouch!” Iolo had thrown a wobbly pass that had smacked Tabala in the face and sent her tripping over her own feet. “Is her nose bleeding?”

“She’s fine,” Statura said flatly, ignoring Snap muttering under his breath.

“Well…” Jessika started again. “There was a kid we recruited from Corellia not too long after Poe and his crew had defected. Really sweet kid, fresh out of whatever school system they have there. Had a lot of talent and even more bad luck.” Out of the corner of her eyes she saw Rey pull her legs up to hug to her chest. “The night after that mission Poe and Snap played a game of one-on-one close to the woods and he came back with a big black eye.”

“Who did?”

It was Finn, notably caf-less and sliding against the last bit of living grass to sit on Rey’s other side. A spot on his bottom lip was red-raw where his teeth had been hard at work worrying in the time they’d been apart.

“Poe, apparently,” Rey said. “So how is he?”

“Wh--why would I know? We’re not allowed to see him.”

“But that’s why you stayed back, right?” Jessika leaned behind Rey’s back and raised her eyebrows. “To try anyway?”

“Maybe,” he muttered, and Rey smiled to herself almost too briefly to catch. “Skywalker went to go see him, though.”

Right as he was about to say something else, the astromech shrilled loudly to announce the end of the octet, and as the teams switched positions on the field, Statura had to chase Nien Nunb off the pitch as he had been trying to sneak back on.

“You weren’t kidding about this being entertaining,” he said.

“Why was Master Luke allowed to see him?” Rey murmured to herself as the game started up again.

Jessika suspected that it wasn’t a question she had actually been asking the two of them: Rey followed the arc of the ball as it bounced from one set of hands to another, tugged at the ends of the wrapping covering the lower part of her arms. The reason Skywalker had been allowed wherever they were keeping Poe was _because he was Luke Skywalker_. Kalonia didn’t need to give him permission--if he wanted to see Poe, that was all he would need to offer.

The real question, then, buried deep in the first, was why Skywalker had wanted to.

* * *

 

After another day and a half of attempting to sleep as much time away as possible, Kalonia forced Poe to revert back to a regular sleep cycle by adding low doses of caf pills to his morning regimen of medicine and staffing a medical droid in the room to make sure normal naps didn’t turn into another full night’s sleep.

In the endlessly long expanses of wakefulness, he found that the anger had subsided to a more manageable level; that, or he had grown accustomed to the low boil and learned how to breathe in the steam. The droid wasn’t programmed for much by way of conversation and he was starting to grow restless with boredom. Surely BB-8 was out of the shop--they had more than enough practice in waking him up when even the base’s emergency sirens hadn’t, and it would have been much more pleasant than this droid prodding him in the ribs and repeating UP! UP! UP! until he swatted it away.

The hours turned into days and eventually Kalonia trusted him enough to forego the caf pills, though the droid stayed. And for an entire week the droid watched silently as he slept in the acceptable part of the day, when the bustle down the halls and through the concrete walls outside had died down.

Every night he found himself back in that TIE fighter, though the timeline would slide around the scene, picking up in the middle one night before shifting to the beginning, to the last moments before both engines burst out in a fiery ring, to first spotting the A-wing with the green number four, to another perspective: far off on an Imperial-age star destroyer watching his ship’s ashes begin the fall into the endless gorge of space below.

His reflexes--in the dreams where the fire had not yet begun to spread, it was his reflexes he noticed the most. He had been three steps ahead of the A-wing the entire time and his hands reacted to the battle beyond the glass of the cockpit like they had their own separate pair of eyes, their own brain dedicated solely to anticipating the other ship’s every move.

Until, of course, it couldn’t. But the dreams never showed that moment.

He replayed the pieces in the morning and calculated the trajectory of the A-wing would have had to take to jump from one point to another, to cover the gap. At one point, he guessed that he could have easily seen inside the ship to the pilot; but they remained a faceless Rebel Alliance fighter until Luke came back to sit by his bedside again, and then they just stopped altogether.

“You’re calmer today,” Luke said. “Do you feel calmer?”

“I don’t know.” And it was the truth, still. He was calmer, maybe, but it felt like a more diplomatic way of saying _duller but still just the same._

“You can, though.”

Poe wondered how many times Luke had given this speech before, or even how many times he had heard it himself during his own training. _Quiet your mind_ \--but his mind wasn’t the source of the noise-- _focus on your feelings_ \--wasn’t that the issue?-- _let the Force flow through you_ \--no, no, there had been quite enough of that.

But Luke frowned at him, clearly sensing his protests. “Understanding your feelings and your relationship with the Force will only help you. That’s all I’m trying to do.” 

Sighing, he squeezed his eyes shut and settled back into the pillows propped up against the headboard. Beyond the dark of the inside of his eyelids he conjured up the treeline of Yavin 4 halfway through the hot season: gold flocks of whisper birds would peek their heads through the canopy to bask in the sun while the humidity was low and aside from the tips of the Massassi temples, the sea of green went on forever until it dipped into the horizon. Here was a space he didn’t need to think, where he came exclusively _not_ to think.

The trees zipped under him more smoothly than the old family cruiser should have been capable of. The sun beat down through the cockpit and the sweat was starting to bead heavily at his hairline.

He pushed the throttle down further, past the point where his father kept telling him to not even get close to, and he waited for the rattling in the engine and the wind whistling in the gaps of the door. Even the largest crack, still covered by thick electrical tape from Poe’s adolescent crash in the village, it kept quiet instead of whining out a note that always sounded so close to the voice of the local old mechanic who’d watched the panel buckle around the tree. _Did the pilot genes skip you, Dameron, or what?_

And later, when parts of the village came by to see him off to the Academy, it had been the same speech from different faces. _Make them proud, us too. Do right by your ma. Big shoes to fill_. But his feet looked so small in the old Rebel Alliance boots he’d nicked from his father’s closet, and they could tell. They could sense he was done growing. Nevermind that he was top of the class in the whole of the New Republic, those shoes would always look floppy from any angle other than his own.

Even then he’d wonder if they were right. The cruiser whipped faster across the forest, just a green smudge now, and he could see his feet pressed up under the dash. He felt like he was wriggling his toes in a cavern and it wasn’t the pair of shoes he remembered pulling on himself.

The whole expanse outside the cruiser was a blur.

Every time he scored well at the Academy, the officers--veterans of the war--would call him Bey. (He hated it.) Every time his gangly growing pilot’s wings tripped over themselves, they switched back to his actual name. (He hated it even more, somehow.)

But what he had hated the most, more than the crowds of people who couldn’t see his own face through a ghost, was watching the news reports come through the holovids over breakfast about the collection of starships drifting out of the Unknown Regions and the spurts of destruction left around the systems in their wake. They would gulp down their caf and toss a piece of fruit in their pocket to eat before lunch without hardly paying it any attention, as if they couldn’t see that something foul and far too familiar was in the air.

“Poe.”

Back in the Cresh Wing med bay. Luke’s hand reached to lay gently on his shoulder as Poe steadied his breathing.

“I don’t think I did it right,” he said.

“You did fine,” Luke said. “You searched your feelings and you found them, even if they weren’t so recent.” He sat forward in his chair and clasped one of Poe’s hands between his own, searching for eye contact that once he secured, Poe found near-impossible to break. “Whatever they said to you to make you think you were lost to the Light after what happened--it’s not true. The Dark Side feeds on fear and anger and hate, and you have too much good in you for any of that to alter your fate.”

If every inch of him hadn’t felt like a hundred pounds of lead, Poe would’ve probably laughed right in his face.

“I’m going to be starting up my training sessions with Rey again soon,” he said. “I’d… you have the Force partly because of me. I want to teach you how to use--”

“No.”

“Poe.”

“I don’t want to learn how to use it,” he said. “If anything, I want to learn how to get rid of it.”

“Well… we can’t do that.” Luke smiled at him grimly and patted his knee through the blanket. It was becoming increasingly evident to Poe that whatever picture of his predicament Luke was sensing through his own connection with the Force was warped beyond recognition. “If you don’t want me to teach you, that’s okay. But--meet me halfway. At least sit in on them once you check out of here, all right?”

While he didn’t want to agree to even that, Luke’s attempts at hiding the twinges of some sort of pain were starting to falter, and Poe couldn’t bear to add to that weight.

**********

He thought he would have at least another couple of days before they pulled him back into society, but the next morning, the medical droid was prodding at his side again while Kalonia was throwing odds and ends from around the med bay into a small box. He tried to peer into it from where he sat up on the bed, but it wasn’t anything he recognized her using on him any other time he’d been in her care.

“I’m afraid your med bay goodie bag this time around isn’t exactly what I would call traditional,” she sighed. “So, lucky you. No bacta patch regimen or massive pills to swallow every other hour.” She laid the box in his lap once he swung his legs over the side--a rainbow of assorted tea bags were piled an inch deep and the meld of their muted, earthy aromas darkened the room like he was five again and hiding in the back of his parents’ spice cabinet.

“My grandmother was a big believer in remedies,” she said, pressing a piece of paper into his hand. It had each type labeled with what it treated: anxiety, insomnia, nausea, a whole host of ailments that plagued him since he was captured. “Six-two here will take it to your bunk--Skywalker said you were supposed to meet him in the gymnasium this morning.”

Which was conveniently located across the base and on the other side of the busiest hubs of activity. The thought of passing the techs and analysts in the hall with their sympathetic greetings of _good to have you back_ or running into any of the other pilots--Jessika especially--and then Rey and Finn--he was out of the med bay, he would have to act like there had been a good enough reason for them to let him out, and every star in the sky would have to intervene to keep them from noticing _it_.

The lore about the Force had been diluted since the age of the Jedi Order, but the galaxy still knew the shell of it. What Luke had shared about the fuel of the Dark Side, that was common knowledge, and then Luke kept talking about this abundance of goodness he said he felt in Poe as if he couldn’t sense the rest of it.

There was anger there: a fountain of gasoline in the warm spot in his chest, pent up for years until someone tapped a well down and waited. And hate, too. Not as deep. But as he trudged, head down, to the other side of the base, he replayed the scene with Ren on Mustafar.

Poe had wanted him dead and he’d wanted to be the one to do it. He hadn’t been quick enough with the lightsaber, hadn’t thrown him hard enough. Hadn’t paused long enough to think where all this was coming from, just that it was _here_ and _present_ and _convincing_. The door to this part of himself had been thrown open and broken against the wall, and with no way to return it to the way it was, he would have to find a way to cover the hole in its absence.

Not carve the doorway wider.

That was what Luke didn’t understand.

But still he took himself to the gymnasium, which was less of a gymnasium than it was an extra hangar the mechanics had taken issue with for having ceilings too low. He would show up and appease Luke and working into easing the new shape of himself back into the hole he’d left behind.

Luke and Rey were already meditating at the center of the mats when he walked in. Neither one of them moved or made any indication that they were aware that he’d arrived, so he backed up the nearby wall and slid to a seat, resigning himself to watching the patterns of dust motes floating in the dim light for however long it took them to come to.

“I’m glad you’re here, Poe,” Luke said, and Poe jumped nearly an inch off the ground. “It’s going to be a good session today.”

Rey’s face contorted into a frown and she groaned, even mid-meditation.

“Rey, _concentrate_.”

“‘Good session’ is just your way of saying ‘watch Rey suffer’--”

“ _Rey_.”

The frown deepened for another half second more before smoothing out once more, almost as if the outburst hadn’t happened at all. Or even as if her commune with the Force--or whatever this was supposed to be--wasn’t the kind of nightmarish ordeal his had been the day before. Clearly there were advantages to working solely within the Light.

After meditation, they moved on to some sort of stretching exercise--yoga, maybe, the kind of poses he’d seen Karé in after that one recon mission near Wild Space, but those paled next to the contortions he saw before him now. The fact that Luke’s body could bend like that without any hint of strain was all the more miraculous when he spotted how Rey was struggling. Trying to mask it, but struggling all the same.

“Master Luke,” she said, limbs trembling in the fourth pose. “May I ask again what this is good for?”

“This is the eighth time you’ve asked since your training has begun and you’re going to receive the same answer,” he said.

“Which is nothing.” Her voice was starting to shake some as well.

Luke only grinned.

Poe felt a twist of annoyance on her behalf and added another couple reasons why he was glad to be opting out. Watching them had rekindled the itch that would collect at the bottom of his feet when he had been grounded too long; that was something he could still fit into, despite everything. The Force couldn’t take that away from him.

By the time they were shaking out their last pose, Poe noticed Jessika poke her head through the door and slide inside casually, careful not to let it slam behind her or let her own steps echo too loudly as she maneuvered to where he sat. She joined him on the floor and immediately his eyes started to sting--he couldn’t look directly at her without risking it flooding over the rest of his face.

But she looped her arm with his, uncharacteristically tender, and laid her head on his shoulder.

“Don’t you ever scare me like that again, you nerf herder.”

 _And there it is._ “That wasn’t exactly what I set out to do, you know.”

“It never is.”

 _Thank you for bringing me back_ \--it queued up at the back of his throat but it didn’t feel right. _Thank you for coming after me_ \--better, but the disconnect still rattled around in his head, the loose ends never quite reaching back to each other. And he waited for a third alternative to come along before another thought snuck up on him, quiet and whispering along the shell of his ear, asking whether he had wanted this at all. To come back when his skin didn’t sit right on his bones, when who they thought they were pulling back to base didn’t exist anymore, or not in the way they expected.

None of this was anything he could say to Jessika, so he swallowed down the words and laid his head on top of hers.

“Good gods…”

Poe hadn’t noticed that Luke and Rey had moved on to the next part of the training session, though he wasn’t sure how he’d missed it: Rey was doing a one-armed handstand and balancing three small boxes on the underside of her sole, her other hand slowly guiding a fourth through the air to stack on top. Her brow was knit in concentration, mouth scrunched up into the smallest, most fervid scowl as the box wobbled in the air.

“Focus…” Luke said.

“I’m having trouble forming words,” Jessika muttered. She had sat back up and was shameless staring wide-eyed at Rey as a familiar pink tinge rose along her cheekbones.

“Testor.”

She whipped toward him, glaring hard enough to fell a rathtar, and he felt his face form a grin for the first time since Mustafar. “ _What_.”

“You didn’t.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The center of his chest cooled a fraction from its fiery throb as his grin grew even bigger--here was a script they had, jotted down on actual paper and kept squeezed in the palms of their hands until it sank into the skin entirely, and that patch of skin on him started to feel like home again.

“I think you do,” he said lightly.

With chin in hand and the other arm wrapped around her stomach, she took another moment to scowl in silence. “Fine,” she sighed. “I will admit it’s not the smartest situation I’ve ever gotten myself into.”

But it wasn’t the worst by far--there had been the Twi’lek girl, Suprutu, on the mission they’d taken to Tatooine together, before they’d realized she was the First Order spy they’d been warned to watch out for; the mysterious ex Jessika had left on Corulag and the blanks he was left to fill with nothing good; and of course there had been Kaydel.

“Come on,” he whispered. “It would be ridiculous if she _also_ had a secret wife back on her home planet. That’s just unlikely.”

“Y’know, for once I’m not thinking about that.” She glanced over and grimaced pathetically, halfway to a pout. “Poe, she has a lightsaber. She can use _the Force_.”

He knew Jessika well enough that the implications buried there rose to the top like a buoy: the security of being objectively the scariest person in a relationship was something she counted on. An insurance policy for what, at this point, she probably viewed as an inevitable outcome.

But cotton had closed around his ears when she lumped the Force in with all that, and Rey--Rey wasn’t tainted with the Dark Side. Her connection had been given time to grow and be nurtured under Luke’s training, reaching for the Light like the tall flowers that grew in the grasslands on Yavin 4.

Jessika wouldn’t be sitting this close to him if he knew. She wouldn’t be arm-in-arm or want to keep up their monthly bad holofilm night.

Rey had just floated the fourth box to the stack when he jumped up. “I’m sorry--I have to go.”

“Poe--” Jessika said, but then Rey twisted her head to try to find the source of the voice.

“Jessika? When--” And she toppled to the ground, boxes bouncing off the backs of her knees.

Pushing through the gymnasium doors, Poe’s neck ran hot with the look Luke was shooting him, and the disappointment filtered right down to his breastbone, peeling away into something denser he couldn’t put a finger on. Didn’t want to put a finger on, not now. Facing him could come later once his thoughts had unclenched themselves from the choking sense of panic.

* * *

 

Since Poe’s return, the Resistance had been operating on a lower level than Finn had become accustomed to. Pilots were sent out only for supply runs, hardly leaving D’Qar, much less the Ileenium system as a whole. Many of the analyst and tech chairs in the situation room sat empty during shifts. With so much free time on their hands left to think too hard about the state of the galaxy, grav-ball games became almost a daily occurrence and had been toeing closer and closer to becoming flat-out tackle if the scrapes and bruises among the pilots were any indication.

Earlier that day, just after Rey had left for her Jedi training and Jessika had left to take care of some vague, nondescript errands, Karé had dropped into the seat across from him and tried to recruit him for her team. “Saba, you know, that cute mechanic with the sick defense on our team?” Finn honestly hadn’t paid that much attention to the grav-ball games but he nodded anyway as it felt like the smart thing to do. “Well,” Karé said, lowering her voice. “She broke her arm yesterday. Kalonia’s got her holed up in med bay under the story she tripped on an oil slick, but that still leaves us one body short.”

He could hear the shouts from the game on the other side of the wall from his bunk, and he was all the more thankful he told her no. Jessika had lent him a few of her favorite holonovels, anyway, and the large stack wasn’t going to read itself.

He was halfway through the fourth chapter of an old Alderaanian political thriller when the door to the room slammed open and Poe flopped down on his long-empty bed, hands gripping the sides of his head. Finn tossed the book aside immediately and swung his legs to the ground. “They didn’t tell me they were releasing you today!”

The smile faded from his lips when Poe didn’t look up, only sighing and running his fingers through his hair.

“What’s going on, Poe?”

“I… I had a rough time of it this go-round.” He finally met his gaze, but Finn’s was drawn towards the purple arcs under his eyes that he couldn’t remember being there before, even after they had first met on the Finalizer.

Finn moved to sit beside him on his own bed, but Poe jumped up and started pacing around the small bit of cleared floor in the room. He kept running his hands over his face, each breath coming out a sigh--or maybe he was merely breathing heavily, a hand pushing down on his lungs.

“If you need to talk about it, I’m right here.”

“I’m trying.” His voice broke over the last syllable.

“Okay.”

Finally he stopped, his mouth and eyes pinching to a point where Finn thought they would start to crumble under the pressure, and he absently rubbed this thumb along his breastbone--up and down, up and down, somewhere between a nervous tic and one with a purpose he couldn’t know.

The words came out of Poe’s mouth all at once: “I think you should’ve left me there.”

“What in the hell are you talking about?”

“Something’s not right with me, Finn,” he said. The pacing started up again with a newfound fervor. “They did something to me--I can’t--I can’t be here like this. I can’t be in the _Resistance_ when--”

“Hey, _hey._ ” A couple steps and Finn had crossed the distance between them, put one hand on each of Poe’s shoulders until he could stand still, until he could make himself look him right in the eyes. “I don’t know what they did but I don’t need to know to tell you it’s not your fault.” And Poe looked as if he were about to laugh at the idea, incredulous that Finn could even suggest such a thing.

Words felt insufficient, orbiting around what needed to be done and growing infinitesimally closer without ever touching it. And where words failed, there was another language crawling up Finn’s arms that didn’t need them at all, the one where he could hold Poe to him while they slept and he could bury his nose in the hollow of Finn’s collarbone. _You can be here. You can be in the Resistance. It doesn’t matter what they did to you--weren’t you the first person to show me that?_ (But wordless, it would have been wordless, woven into the loom of his ribs by the arms that held them to each other.)

“But it _is_ my fault, Finn,” he said. “It is.” He grabbed one of Finn’s wrists and placed it on his chest where his thumb had been worrying. “Can’t you tell?”

Finn squinted at his hand, splayed dark against the olive green of Poe’s shirt. “Do you always run this hot?” Part of him worried that this was his own reaction, that the heat was in his head and just from touching him through the fabric, but another few moments passed and the heat was alive. The heat was terrified and bordering on wrathful before it twisted back onto itself with loathing. “Poe--”

“I have the Force.” He still hadn’t let go of Finn’s wrist. “I didn’t--I didn’t know? But they did… somehow.”

“You have the _Force_?” He couldn’t help but grin at him, glancing down at his hand on his chest in awe. “That’s incredible--”

“No, it’s not!” Poe dropped his wrist and flung his arms back by his side, and the basket of unfolded laundry at his feet flew through the air to the back wall. “It’s not!” He pushed past Finn and put himself back between him and the door to the room. “Because it’s the Dark Side. Kylo Ren laid out a path to the Dark Side I couldn’t see until I’d already kriffing followed it and crossed the line. The Resistance has no place for this, I--I feel like a damn mole for the First Order, Finn. _That’s_ why you should have left me.”

Finn stared at him as he blinked hurriedly to erase any evidence of tears. The Dark Side of the Force--and the Force in general--wasn’t anything he knew too much about. They didn’t go around teaching that sort of thing among the stormtroopers aside from name-dropping it here and there in history lessons about the Empire. Darth Vader and the Emperor, they had the Dark Side. And Kylo Ren, too. But Poe, he may have the purple under his eyes and the shadow of a beard, but he was the same man who had trusted him without hesitation on the Finalizer and regularly risked everything in the name of freedom for the galaxy, who treated everybody on base--from the gonk droids to the General--with the utmost respect and affection.

“You’re still you, though,” Finn said. “Dark Side or not.”

“Isn’t that the problem? That the potential for this was always there?”

“Poe, everyone has sides that they aren’t proud of. You’re human.”

“Vader was too. Before he turned. And look what happened to him.”

“Poe Dameron.” Every part of him was so heavy with the waves rolling from Poe where his hand had laid. “You’re nothing like him. Everyone in the Resistance could tell you that. And if you’re hurting like this, we can help you. We want to help you. Myself included because--stars, Poe, I’m in love with you and it’s all I want for you to be okay.”

Poe blinked. Frowned. His mouth formed around a couple words that never came to fruition and then he finally eked out, “You’re… what?”

“I love you.” The idea was simple enough: he loved him, he wanted above all for him to be happy and at peace in his life, he would do whatever it took to help him get there.

“You said… _in_ love.”

“Well… yes.” It was true, but Finn didn’t understand why he was making the distinction.

“Buddy…” For a single moment his face crumpled terribly; and then, like it hadn’t happened, he was back to avoiding eye contact. “I’m not in any position to be that for you.”

Finn’s stomach lurched like he had missed a step on a staircase as he ran through their conversation in his head. He hadn’t thought he’d implied anything of the sort, but accidents happen--“I wasn’t asking you to.” And Poe blinked at him again, floundering slightly for a mental footing. “I told you that I’m in love with you because--well, it’s true, and I… like you said, you’re having a rough time. I want you to know how much I’m going to be there for you.”

Poe continued to stare, his thumb coming back to that same spot on his chest, and Finn wondered if he had miscalculated something along the way. Love, for all of his limited experiences with it, seemed so incredibly simple: you love someone and it’s a fire against the cold, you share that love with someone and it’s a shield. He’d noticed it with Rey, the immediate familial bond they’d forged running for their lives on Jakku, the relief of being reunited on Starkiller. And it explained so much about those nights with Slip when he would babble on and on about the stormtrooper in the FZ corps--Slip loved them and he would tell everyone he could trust so it would grow into something so strong and all-encompassing that even Phasma’s harsh criticism couldn’t knock him down.

“Did I do something wrong?” he asked when Poe still said nothing.

“No, it’s--I…” he sighed. “Most people… when they’re _in_ love with someone--it’s not something they come right out and say, usually. Not unless they looking to start a relationship. Otherwise…”

“They hide it?” Finn said slowly, and Poe nodded. “Why would you hide that you love someone?”

Poe threw his arms up in a shrug and slogged back to his bed, falling on top of the sheets that had stayed unmade since he had left for Dantooine. He was staring back up at the ceiling, their own chunk of the blank expanse of the galaxy--and the planet seemed to shift under Finn’s feet, overlaying the last night they had spent in here together with the image before him.

“I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable, telling you that,” Finn said.

“It’s okay.”

“I meant what I said, though.” He chewed at his bottom lip when Poe lifted his head to squint at where he stood. “You don’t have to do this alone.” That was all he wanted him to understand. Dark Side or not, he wasn’t leaving.

“Why do you think I told you?”

* * *

 

The game of grav-ball had ended abruptly when the General marched onto the pitch and intercepted Iolo’s pass like she had been secretly practicing their backs all this time--and for all they knew, she might have been. But as they slunk back into base, having taken a moment to stare dumbly at the sight of her arm held high, gripping the ball with one hand, it was wordless agreed that the speculation on the matter would have to wait. 

Rey and Jessika had taken their time gathering themselves to follow the last few stragglers disappearing around the corner to the tarmac, long enough to catch the General scoring a goal with a lazy toss over her shoulder while she motioned for Statura.

“Get me Ematt, Ackbar, Dameron, Wexley, Bastian, the whole crew--you too, Pava!” she said. “There’s something brewing over off the Widek Bypass and we have to put a plug in it.”

“General,” Statura said slowly, trailing after her. He had been halfway through changing his shoes and was hopping clumsily trying to pull the other one on as she strode ahead. “Are--are you sure you want Dameron there?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“He just got out of med bay today,” Jessika said as they caught up. Her face paled, the glow the midday sun had brought to her cheeks suddenly sinking away. “I saw him at Rey’s training earlier this morning for a little bit--”

“He’s not fit to fly,” Rey finished. She’d hardly had a real glimpse at him the entire time he was there, but there were some things, like where he had been on the star destroyer, that she could tell better without the aid of her eyes. The sense was stronger this time, stronger still after picking the boxes back up and finishing the exercise with the heat of Jessika’s gaze on the back of her neck--the shape of Poe held in the web of all living things, some lines taut enough to whine and others drooping to the ground, and he was wilting where he once stood tall.

The General sensed it, too. She turned and met Rey’s glance for half a second and turned back to Statura. “I’m aware he’s not fit to fly. That was the first directive I put out after he was released. But I’ll be damned if I don’t have my squadron commander there to help develop a plan of action--”

“I don’t think he’s even fit to do that!”

They all stopped on a dime at Jessika’s outburst, waiting; or, all of them but the General waited, as there was more than one possibility where this ended in being shipped off to the Resistance’s “new” outpost on Hoth. In their imaginations, at least. The collective cold grip of dread was enough fuel to power them to wherever in the galaxy the General wanted to put them.

“I know, Pava.” The General’s voice had dropped close to a whisper. “If it’s too much for him, of course he can leave the meeting, but I can’t let him think we’ve abandoned him.”

“Why would he think that?” Rey asked, but the General had already turned her attention back to Statura.

“Go, Admiral, you’ve got both your shoes on, what’s the holdup? Assemble my officers.”

Ten tense minutes later, they were gathered around the central map of the situation room, Poe’s head a full couple feet shorter than the rest as he had pulled up a chair to the standing huddle. He sat in it backwards and leaned the weight of his whole torso along the top edge of the back, burying half his face in his arms.

Jessika hadn’t done the image justice: he looked _awful_.

She reached for her knee and remembered that Finn had slid in the room just before the General had cleared her throat to begin--some vague crisis at the hangar, he’d said, Jessika’s astromech droid would only speak to her, he’d said. A lie, obviously, but no one had been paying quite enough attention to question it, so the spot on the bench beside her was cold.

“As most of you know,” the General said, and the idle chatter died immediately. “The New Republic’s economy relied heavily on the centralized trade posts on Hosnian Prime. Many of their trading partners outside the Republic were hesitant to keep up relations after-- _what happened_. After the senate was reestablished, they sent a diplomatic envoy to Galantos here”--she pointed to a spot near the center of the map and it zoomed in--“in the western reach of the Core Worlds to discuss a possible economic alliance with the Fians.”

“Unfortunately, we have also picked up data that shows an entire fleet of TIE fighters heading in that direction on the underside of the Koornacht Cluster.” This wasn’t a voice Rey recognized--one of the analysts, a blonde with her hair in two tight buns on the side of her head, appeared at the General’s side with a holopad and manipulated the map from there. “The New Republic ship isn’t equipped with much by way of defensive measures, much less offensive.”

“Plus…” Poe had lifted his chin from the inside of his elbow and placed it on top of his folded arms. “They’re hiding the Senate after Starkiller. Can’t have the First Order following them back there.”

His voice sounded dead but once Rey focused, tuned out the rest of the discussions that arose, she saw that it was less dead than fatigued. Strained. Like his arms were about to give out from holding a lead weight over his head and he couldn’t decide if he wanted them to.

He caught her staring and she didn’t turn away. Neither did he. Whatever fixed their gazes there was as thick as rope but unpresent; and even then, his end was starting to smolder, making smoke she could not see until it crept into his lungs. But he did not stop to cough.

“So it’s settled then,” the General said. “Wexley and Pava will respectively lead the Blue and Black squadrons to the Widek Bypass; Blue will accompany the New Republic vessel to Galantos while Black intercepts the First Order’s attack. Roll out is in one hour.”

The officers moved in a roiling sea as they ran to assemble the rest of their squadrons, breaking awkwardly against the three islands that remained still. The General, eyes carefully tracing the dotted paths of the TIE fighters across the Deep Core, barely twitched when the others jostled her, but Poe was active. A mountain rising with slowly hardening spurts of heat from his own core until he could break through the surf and vie for her attention. The sea, as it ebbed, paid him little mind.

“General.”

“Commander,” she said shortly. “Are we listing ranks? I’m not sure Rey has one yet, but we can make do--”

“I lead Black Squadron,” he said. “Not that Jessika isn’t more than capable, but if I’m going, shouldn’t I--”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Commander.”

“ _What_.”

“You’re not going,” she said. “You’re grounded until Doctor Kalonia and Luke clear you for duty.”

“This is a complicated and dangerous mission, General, _they need me out there--_ ”

“Raising your voice isn’t going to make me change my mind!” she shouted. She took a moment to catch her breath, watching to ensure Poe didn’t continue with whatever he was going to say. And he didn’t, not verbally, but it enveloped the room like a fog, fuming and thick. “You’re not in any shape to steer a land cruiser, much less lead an effort like this. I’m trying to save your damn life.” A beat: “Rey, would you please go find Captain Pava and make sure she heard the orders.”

Rey had never been so glad to escape a conversation in her life, even counting Jakku. Their voices echoed down the hall, finally drowned out in the tall ceilings of the cafeteria where veteran pilots were helping the newer recruits check their life support boxes were secure; it was the opposite direction of the hangar where Finn had supposedly taken her, so it had to be the best bet.

Or so she had thought: in all of the orange and white spread through the room, she couldn’t spot Jessika’s distinct thick braid or the particular angle of her hips while she waited impatiently for whoever was dawdling behind her. Finn, too, was missing, but he had more of an excuse--

“Hey hey, Lady Rey!” Bastian clapped a hand on her shoulder as he strode up behind her. “If we’d known you were gonna fly out with us, I’d have lent you my spare flak suit.”

“Um, _okay_ ,” she said. “I mean, that’s obviously _not_ the case--”

“I know, I know. You just looked tense. What’s eating you?”

His grin was infectious enough to poke at the beginnings of one for herself, despite everything--especially for him. To be facing a mission this risky like it was an ordinary day of drills took a particular kind of courage. Or bravado. Or whatever it was that kept all these pilots on this base, day after day.

“I was looking for Jessika,” she said. “Or Finn, really. Last I saw her she was with him.”

“Oh, _really_ ,” he laughed.

“It’s a little urgent,” she hissed, and she hoped that her grin had turned just the right amount of sour to get the point across.

“Well,” he said after an unnecessarily long couple seconds, “I saw Finn at least back in Aurek Wing’s bunks. She’s probably not too far behind, if you’re right.”

He smirked as she turned on her heel back in the direction she came--if he hadn’t held her up, the vague insinuations he’d been making about Finn and Jessika may have bordered on funny, but it had left her even more heated than his obstruction would have by itself. Finn and Jessika together. Like that. Laughable, wasn’t it? As if the two of them would want to kiss each other on the mouth or go-- _further_. Besides, Finn had been the one to pinpoint how _Rey_ had somehow come to the position to want to kiss Jessika on the mouth, so it wouldn’t have made sense. No sense at all. But Bastian has still planted the image there, and the further it seared itself into the back of her head, the more she realized that she hadn’t taken into account.

Such as: the crucial missing step between realizing that you wanted to kiss someone on the mouth to _actually_ kissing that person on the mouth.

Such as: whether you were the type of person that someone would want to kiss on the mouth at all.

Rey hadn’t even gotten that far in her thinking. There had been the _oh no_ , the hot flashes to her cheeks while her mind wandered before bed--but the idea of Jessika reciprocating, no. Not at all. Bastian’s crude portrait of Jessika and Finn managed to bring up yet another issue she hadn’t yet considered. The few instances of human couples she’d seen on Jakku, Han and the General, the smattering of offhand references around the base--she’d never seen two women before.

Was that something people did? Finn hadn’t reacted like it was strange, but he hadn’t exactly had a normal upbringing either.

(Even after she left, Jakku still found new ways to steal from her.)

“Rey!”

She stopped and turned, finding Finn sticking his head out of the door to his bunk. “There you are--is Jessika, um. Is she still with you?”

He opened the door all the way and stepped aside; Jessika was sitting on an upside-down laundry basket amid the heaps of mess in the room. “Greetings,” she said flatly, saluting. “How’d you survive the rest of that meeting? They always sound urgent, but as soon as we all sit down to discuss the whole thing, it rarely is--”

“You’re leading Black Squadron.”

Jessika glanced between the two of them as her mouth fell open. “I’m what?”

“Leading Black Squadron,” Rey repeated. “The General grounded Poe and--”

“ _Kriff_.” She bounded up from her seat, stumbling on a few stray shoes and a lump in the throw rug, but she skidded to a halt outside the room between where Rey and Finn now stood. The way her face sat, it was exactly the same as all the times Rey had sat on the other side of the situation room in debriefings the two weeks before Dantooine, tucked into a jaw-jutting glower aiming to gouge out Iolo’s eyes if he wouldn’t _shut the pfassk up_. But her eyes were never this shiny then.

“I’ve never led a squadron before,” she said. Glanced at Rey. Something in her hand pulling at her fingers, flexing against the empty air there.

 _You shouldn’t feel like this, looking at her_. “I’m sure you’ll do beautifully.”

Jessika half snorted, pushing a twitch of a grin to her face. “Beautifully?”

“S-spectacularly, you know.” Rey waved her hand in front of her face, tried to shrug it off. Wouldn’t look her in the eye. The floor was safe, though. It was safe, and down there were still Jessika’s feet, which hadn’t moved. “It was just the first word that came to mind…?”

When Jessika’s feet still didn’t budge--even though she wished they would, she really did, because _why did she just say that_ \--Rey looked back up and found herself staring into a dark mahogany intensely fixated on her own burning cheeks.

“It was, huh?” Jessika’s mouth--where she was now drawn to--tried to pinch away from another smile.

Rey desperately wished it wouldn’t.

“Anyway, I--um…” Jessika said haltingly. “I need to go get caught up. And in my suit. To go--uh. Fly. Blow up some TIE fighters. That sort of thing.”

Without another word she sprinted down the hall, shouting after Snap and Karé as she rounded the corner. If Rey’s gauge of time were correct, Jessika had another forty-five minutes to get caught up to speed and settled in her cockpit at the head of the formation. The formation that was flying to Galantos and into a horde of enemy ships.

“Are you okay?” Finn rested a hand her shoulder, which took her by surprise. The first words out of his mouth after witnessing her crash and burn like that should’ve been higher on the ribbing scale.

“Honestly, who knows.”

Somehow she had forgotten that bringing Poe back to D’Qar wouldn’t end the war. That it had kept on in their absence and would keep pushing into the days ahead after they landed, and the missions would involve the simple mathematics of holding your breath until you could count the number of X-wings breaking back through the clouds and calculate, lungs fluttering, how many didn’t make it home.

“Do you want to see them off in a bit?”

She opened her mouth, tongue forming around a yes--but: “No.”

“No? Are you sure?”

“I’m not watching anyone leave if I don’t know they’re coming back.”

Finn sighed and squeezed her shoulder like he was considering pulling her in for a hug. “She’s coming back.They’re all going to come back.”

He sounded so sure of himself, taking on that resolute set of his shoulders he had managed to perfect since their first meeting. Nothing that could cross her imagination would move them, hard like stone, so it was just as well to try to take what he said to heart.

“I didn’t realize they were going to ground Poe, though,” he said.

“Are you surprised?”

“No, I…” he sighed. “It’s not something you stop to think about, y’know?”

“He was really upset when the General wouldn’t let him fly,” she said, with the silent addition knit into her brow that underscored her worry.

“I’m going to go see how he’s doing, as long as you’re--”

“I’m fine. Go on.”

He squeezed her shoulder again and rounded the same corner where Jessika had disappeared moments ago, the minutes until roll-out ticking down in her head--and beside that timer sat another where the numbers refused to wind down in any linear, consistent fashion. The shadow it cast on the ground around it was darker than it should have been, and Finn brought a natural light with him. Finn could stop whatever that timer was spiraling down to.

**********

Sirens wailed through the base--they jolted Rey awake from the nap that had been nagging her since her training session ended, and the sensory bombardment threw her off balance as she scrambled down the hall to the situation room. Beneath the sirens was the shouting, the slamming of doors while analysts careened around corners to the old records room. Someone had burnt toast reheating it in the cafeteria and the ashy odor permeated the whole wing. And right at her feet was the pulse dominated by the General’s sharp focus.

“What’s going on?” she shouted over the din once she reached the entrance. Major Ematt shouldered past her, head buried in a holopad and C3PO tottering after him.

Inside, the situation room was in chaos. Every bit of ground support the Resistance had were glued to their stations or yo-yoing between there and an officer. Statura and Ackbar were giving orders in all different directions with each of their hands while their heads yelled in another, and just over their heads, Rey could see them: Finn and the General on either side of Poe, gesticulating wildly as Finn appeared to be pulling Poe back.

“Hey-- _hey!_ ” She pushed her way through a crowd of droids and inserted herself between Poe and the General, helping Finn pull him back. “What is this?”

“The mission is failing and she still won’t let me fly--”

“I said _stand down_ , Commander--” the General said tersely.

“I’m not gonna just sit here and watch them die when I could do something--”

“Finn, get him out of here.”

Despite the scene, all it took to maneuver Poe out of the room was Finn’s hand at his back steering around the rest of the crew. A thousand questions cropped up under the noise as it roared to an even higher decibel, but the beat of it was the same: _the mission is failing, we’re going to watch them die_. It ran around her thoughts and repeated like a curse.

She followed the two of them out to the grav-ball field beside the tarmac and Poe stepped away from Finn’s touch. His hands were knotted in his hair at the temples and he began to pace around the patches of grass closest to the concrete that hadn’t yet been ground into straw.

“You have to let me go,” he said.

“No way, man,” Finn said. “You’re not yourself right now--”

And Poe managed to chuckle. “No, no, no, remember? I am though. We talked about this, buddy. We _talked_ about this.” He paused to scan the couple remaining X-wings that had been left behind, either for maintenance or lack of pilots, and the chuckling turned into an outright grin.

Finn was right, though: Poe wasn’t himself at all. The timer that obeyed its own laws of physics was flipping wildly through the numbers, too fast to discern any individual digit. But it wasn’t the value itself that mattered, she realized. It was the movement of it. The pace, and how it was digging deeper into something a voice at the back of her head warned her to avoid. How the shadow of it sank into an ever darker black.

“I don’t like this,” Poe said. “You know I don’t _like_ it--but I can help them! That’s good, right? That’s good.”

“Finn,” Rey said. “What is he talking about?”

“Ello’s old backup ship is still around. It’ll make it.” Poe ducked under the wings of the ship near where he stood, down onto the middle strip of the tarmac near where the rest of the fleet was parked.

Finn swore under his breath and darted after him, Rey right on his heels. “We didn’t run around half the galaxy to bring you back just for you to try and blow yourself up.” And Poe stopped--didn’t turn around, but he stopped. “I’m not going to watch you throw yourself into this. We talked about this too, remember?”

Rey glanced between the two of them, suddenly aware just how many key pieces she was missing. How much of a liability that could be if the negotiations of talking Poe down were as tenuous as they appeared.

“I know, I know…”

Rey blinked and Poe was inches away from Finn, hands hovering above his arms, slowly tracing the edges of them as his black eyes grew more frenzied.

“But this, this,” Poe said, pointing to his breastbone. “This can only make me stronger… a _better_ pilot. I’ll stop all the TIE fighters, every one of them.”

Finn’s brow softened, with even his shoulders drooping as Poe’s hands closed the gap to latch around his arms. Imploring, on both sides. Silent and heated.

“Hey! Commander!”

On the farthest point of the tarmac lay the mechanic’s shed--and the man who was waving them down now, oil stains smeared all down the pants of his Resistance suit and all his teeth shining in a heap of enthusiasm that Rey couldn’t bear to tolerate at the moment.

“Drem,” Finn said as he jogged closer. “Now’s not a good time--”

“I mean, I _know_ it’s not a good time,” Drem said. His pale skin fought to be seen under the thick covering of freckles across his entire face, and even then parts of it were already starting to turn red in the sun. “What with, y’know, the mission--”

“Exactly,” Poe muttered.

“But I’m under strict orders, see.” Drem’s beam slid into a grimace. “The General and the Admirals, they told me you’re not allowed near the ships.”

“I’m still going, though, I’m still--tell him, Finn. Rey. I can save them!” He turned to Drem, the wild desperation pulling at every muscle in his face and the sun was high in the sky, reducing their shadows to tiny circles under their soles but the light was warping around him. It was simple yet there was a horror to it reflected on her face and creasing worry into Finn’s own.

“I’m sorry, Commander, but orders are orders--” Drem held out a hand to gently steer Poe back away from the remaining ships.

“Drem.”

The boy froze where he stood, only his eyes able to move, flitting around in their sockets as a strangled sound gurgled from his throat--attempting to budge his foot an inch, wiggle a finger and finding it as impossible as holding a planet over your head.

Poe’s own arm was extended and nearly touching Drem’s where it stayed. It shook, vibrating all the way down his chest and to the knee along the same side.

“I’m taking Ello’s spare X-wing,” Poe said. “Okay?”

“Not okay, no--” Rey shouted. “ _No_. Not until you tell me why you’re able to do this just like--like _Kylo Ren_!” A strong gust of wind blew in from the forests, carrying with it the warm aroma of a thick jungle and spring pollen: the same on Takodana that wafted in as she stood frozen with the jagged red lightsaber at her neck and it was all too thick to breathe. It caught in her chest and slopped around her lungs.

Finn glanced down at his shoes then back to the entrance of the base, but Poe’s expression was on the verge of crumpling.

“You have the Force?” she choked out.

“Yeah,” he whispered.

“And isn’t this the Dark Side?”

“Yeah.” It crumpled in earnest then, but he didn’t release his hold on Drem. “But I’m the only one who can bring them back in one piece.”

His composure returned to him in waves, propping his confidence back up with every step he took away from them, Drem pleading with them silently as he remained unable to move.

Briefly Rey wondered if her own abilities with the Force could overpower his, considering the advantage of her training, but turning it on Poe left her mouth sour. With the name out in the open, she could tell now that what she had been feeling was the Force, the Dark Side that Master Luke had spoken of in depth one evening before their return to D’Qar--but the texture of it in the air wasn’t the same as it had been around Ren. The Force that had crashed against her from Ren’s bared teeth on Starkiller was barbed; Poe’s shivered and folded against itself.

“Poe.” Finn approached him gingerly, pausing between each step. And Poe watched him, stopped himself even with the whole of his body turned towards the X-wing he aimed to fly across the galaxy. “Poe, please.” He was close enough now to reach across the gap, laying his hand over Poe’s extended wrist.

Barely a moment passed before Drem fell to his knees, clutched at his chest to cough thick and heavy. Rey ran to his side and helped him up before he shrugged her off, retreating back to his station at the shed with hardly a look back.

“General Organa needs you for strategy more now than anything else,” Finn said. “All right?”

“Okay.” Poe’s arm dropped, but Finn’s hand stayed at his wrist. “I’m--I don’t know what… I’m sorry.” His words fell at their feet with a sincere, weighty thunk. “Stars, what is happening to me--”

“You’re going to be okay,” Finn said. “Come on. The squadron needs you.” With a quick glance back at Rey, he began leading Poe back into the base--and she watched as Poe pulled his arm up until his hand met with Finn’s and his fingers could curl one by one along the bones there. The sight grabbed at her stomach, tightened it into something she didn’t try to name.

**********

Rey kept off to the side in the situation room once Poe had been set up between Ackbar and Statura around the projected radar map--the shouting and frenzy hadn’t stopped in the time they’d been gone, but Master Luke had appeared on the opposite wall from where she stood. He sidled up to Finn, who hadn’t taken his eyes off Poe while he was doling out orders with the rest of the top brass.

A lot of the questions she’d let simmer since this ordeal started had cooled into solid answers--or, something resembling answers that would only melt when she looked too closely. Poe’s apparent latent connection to the Force was activated in the time after he left D’Qar and it had swung heavily towards the Dark in a move that the galaxy should have rendered impossible. Poe Dameron could not have been more different from Kylo Ren or Darth Vader or any of the other Sith Lords that had waded into that dangerous side of the Force. He was struggling with it, the gravity that Master Luke had described as wading into a rushing river with a weight tied onto one’s foot. “You can cut the rope,” he’d said. “You can always cut the rope. But there’s so many other things fighting for your attention--keeping your mouth above water, for instance--that the rope is the last thing on your mind.”

Later he admitted that it was an imperfect metaphor, the true nature of the Force being uncapturable by the weak restraints of language; but watching Poe, Rey couldn’t find anything more apt for the strain that still leaked across his face. Certain lines on his face were getting reworked, the particular hold of his mouth and eyes in the height of a firefight, but the new ones only showed themselves more starkly in the map’s pale blue light, unused to the shadows.

Back across the room, Master Luke had put a hand on Finn’s shoulder and he found her eyes, his other hand stroking his beard with a slow pull of his fingers. He stared ahead at her like he wanted something: a reaction, an acknowledgement that she understood what this all could signify, or even just a smile for warmth amid the orbit of their lives wobbling and threatening to stray.

She couldn’t offer him any of that--she diverted her attention back to the map and all the dots of X-wings and TIE fighters swirling in their own particular orbit around Galantos. They were moving too quickly for her to count and check that it was the same number that had left the base, but Major Ematt and the General were still passing commands along to both Blue and Black Leader, so Snap and Jessika were still in the air. Snap and Jessika, at least, were definitely still alive.

The First Order fleet was relentless, but after a strenuous twenty minute assault Poe had diagrammed with stray nuts and screws at the base of the map projector, the last TIE fighter had lit up the map in a small nova. Blue Squadron had successfully delivered the New Republic envoy to the planet, and--with Jessika’s voice crackling over the airwaves--they hadn’t felled a single X-wing.

They had survived.

Parts of the room cheered, but the officers--Poe included--let their frames shrug off the burden they had been holding so steadily. Silently nodding to their feet, tapping their hands a couple times against the console of the projector. She felt it, their relief, all tempered by the instinctive pull to look ahead to the next step, the next time that every voice checking back in over the frequency could be snuffed out.

On the flight back to D’Qar, Snap and Jessika each gave a report on the damages their squadrons had accrued. Iolo’s shields had been disabled by the time he and the rest of Blue Squadron had broken through the Galantos atmosphere. Jessika, though, had a long list from her side: all minor, the way things stood in that moment, but had the fight lasted any longer it could have gotten ugly.

“Black Leader,” Snap’s voice said over the comms. “I think you’re forgetting one from your squadron.”

“Blue Leader, kindly butt out. Everything is fine.”

“Black Leader, either you tell General Organa about your limping top right engine or I will.”

Rey’s heart stopped in her chest for what felt like a full second.

“Blue Leader, you’re a menace. General, please excuse Blue Leader. He likes to exaggerate.”

The two of them continued to gripe back and forth at each other, but the General stopped paying attention to it almost immediately. Rey watched as she pulled Poe aside to a smaller monitor that had been recording the map’s projection of the battle, her finger following the path of one X-wing in particular--a number of hits landed, though it kept flying, even with the deep orange alert near the same engine Snap had named. Other parts of the ship were colored a warning yellow when they pulled it up in more detail.

The ship was on its way to falling apart and they still had half the galaxy to traverse. Rey had found old specs and maintenance manuals on Rebel- Alliance-era X-wings, poured over them in the belly of her AT-AT when the sand storms were too violent for scavenging. Jumping to hyperspace in the ship’s current state was borderline reckless.

“Black Leader,” Poe said, back at the main map. “We recommend you land on Galantos or Widek until we can send someone to get you. Your ship is not fit to make the trip back to base.”

“Commander, I recognize that you’re relaying this safe route from our superiors, but the status reader isn’t always accurate over long distances--wait, repeat that Black Two?”

The room managed to drop twenty degrees in temperature even as Rey broke out into a sweat. The comms struggled to transmit the shrieking noises around the two squadrons, turning it into angry metallic chunks of sound interspersed with shouting--

“--there’s more--” That was Karé. Followed by a jumble of speech from Nien Nunb.

Every triumphant grin had long been wiped from the room. The transmissions didn’t need to be clear to understand what had happened: the map spoke for itself, an entire new herd of TIE fighters swooping in from the Koornacht Cluster set on enveloping the squadron, ignoring the New Republic ship on Galantos to enact swift revenge.

“Get out of there now, jump to hyperspace,” the General shouted. “Blue Leader, Black Leader--do you copy? Get. _Out_.”

The comms returned light static and the room held its breath. Rey tried to follow the whirls of X-wings on the map, ignoring the ache in her jaw and fists from how tightly they were clenched, but they flew too quickly. The dots overlapped with the TIE fighters and with each other and there wasn’t any way to reassure herself that any of them were coming home, that Jessika--

One by one the X-wings on the map zipped off the edge, the signature streaks of a jump to hyperspace left in their wakes.

Finn tried to catch her eye as began to maneuver over to her side of the room, but she was already halfway out the door. If Jessika’s ship were going to disintegrate in hyperspace, that wasn’t something Rey was sure she could bear to witness.

In fact, she was sure she couldn’t. It had been impossible enough just to watch her leave.

There was a spot along the back of the base, around the corner from the designated grav-ball field, where the grass still lived before giving way to the thick underbrush of the surrounding forests. And that was where she felt her feet taking her now, to sit among the green and stare into the wild expanse of living things all twisted around each other, as if all the trees and vines and flowers’ sole purpose was to protect the core of the planet from the heat of the sun and the harsh realities of what lay beyond the atmosphere.

She sank into center of the small field and wrapped her fingers in the grass, felt the blades stutter thickly along her skin as she lifted her hands back up--but not hard enough to uproot them. The sensation was enough to ground her panicked thoughts from flying towards the unknown resolution of the ambush.

“Rey.”

While she hadn’t told a soul about this place, it was unsurprising Finn had still managed to find her as quickly as he did.

“The grass here is nice,” she said as he sat down beside her. “It’s not dry like it was on Dantooine.”

“Are you okay?”

“You notice how when people are watching grav-ball and there’s a little patch of it still alive over there, the first thing they do is rip it up?” She held the tip of a blade between her thumb and first finger, shifting the angle to examine it from all sides. “I don’t think they even realize they’re doing it.”

Finn sighed, scooted closer to her so their knees touched. After a beat he wrapped an arm around her shoulder. It was warm along the back of her neck but not unpleasantly so in the direct light of the sun overhead.

They sat there together for a few minutes in silence, Finn’s arm around her while she ran her fingers through the same patch of grass over and over again.

“Did you know about Poe?” she asked suddenly. Finn open his mouth to speak and she quickly added, “I’m not upset that you didn’t tell me or anything.”

“I knew,” he said after a moment. “But not until recently.”

“Do you know--um…” She wrapped her arm around his waist and pulled herself closer to him; a tension she didn’t realize his body had been holding suddenly softened. “Do you know what happened to him? To do that?”

“No.” He shook his head. “I don’t even think anybody does. But--”

A familiar whine lit up the air behind them as a handful of X-wings broke tore through the sky and onto the tarmac--neither of them could see who was inside but the blue stripe under the cockpit was enough to start tallying a survivor count.

“Stars…” Rey whispered.

“There’s more coming,” Finn said. “Don’t--”

“I know, I know!” She scrambled to her feet and started running back around the building as another four ships flew in behind the first, this time with black markings. She heard Finn’s footfalls behind her as he spluttered something about her waiting for him.

Already a crowd was collecting at the end of the landing strip, the same spot where they had seen her off on her journey to bring Master Luke back, but the mood was nothing like it had been. The analysts and techs stood with their hands over their mouths, while the officers’ stoic poses were betrayed by their fidgeting feet. Only Master Luke was perfectly still, a hand on Poe’s shoulder.

“Blue Squadron’s all made it back,” Poe said tersely. “Still waiting on the rest of Black--”

Master Luke flexed his grip on Poe’s shoulder. “Easy, now.”

“I’m fine.”

Rey swallowed a grimace; Poe still looked as if he were barely keeping a hold on himself after having not slept for a week, and when Finn caught up at her side, she could tell he was thinking the same thing.

“Focus on your breathing,” Master Luke said quietly. “It’ll help, Poe. I promise.”

Poe nodded begrudgingly and closed his eyes, chest rising deeply with a slow inhale.

“See, what did I tell you?” Master Luke pointed above the treeline where the silhouettes of five more X-wings appeared in the distance.

“How many more left from Black Squadron were we waiting on?” Rey asked hurriedly. Four of the ships were coming in for a quick landing but the fifth was tilted heavily to one side, smoke spilling from one of the top engines.

“Five,” the General said. “We were waiting on five.”

“Thank the Maker!” C3PO called from the back of the crowd. “Even Captain Pava’s ship survived the jump!”

“Can she land it like that?” Rey turned to look at Poe, whose eyes were still following the wobbling path her ship was taking towards the tarmac. He didn’t answer her.

And while she worried that he said nothing because the answer was so obviously a no--the anxiety was unfounded. The X-wing swung into an empty spot ten yards ahead of them, hovered above the concrete, and descended painstakingly slowly; only after the right-side wheels had touched down did she steer the left side down as well.

“Good stars above,” Ackbar muttered behind them. Half the ship was covered in scorch marks. Entire panels along the back of the ship behind the wings had been stripped off, and the engine in question that Snap had brought up over the comms was spewing more smoke by the second, turning white to a near-black gray.

The astromech descended from the back with a clunk, followed soon after by a pair of boots--and before Rey knew what she was doing, she was running headlong across the strip, wrapping her arms around a soot-stained orange jumpsuit and knocking a helmet out of her hands.

“Let me catch my breath, would you?” The tone was joking but Jessika squeezed back even harder, burying her face in the crook of Rey’s shoulder.

“I thought your ship wasn’t going to make it back,” Rey whispered. The top bump of Jessika’s braid fit right under her nose; it smelled of engine grease and smoke but also sweat, the warm sign that she was really _alive_ , here on this planet with her, pressed up against her chest.

Jessika pulled back, searched Rey’s face as she held it in her gloved hands at the base of her jawline. Her grin was tight and controlled, as if spreading it too widely would reopen the gash beside her nose. “I wasn’t going to do that to you.”

The urge to lean in and kiss her was becoming almost unbearable.

Almost.

It was going to start consuming everything inside her chest in a hot boil soon, but out in the open, in front of the entire Resistance, the grip of her fear was enough to keep it to an _almost_. It should have been enough that Jessika returned in one piece, still grinning as she was covered in soot and grime and blood--and that she was grinning at _her_. That Rey could come running to her as soon as she landed and have her embrace reciprocated tenfold. But still: she wanted to kiss her, and the voice at the back of her head was growing louder asserting that this should be kept to herself.

“Kalonia’s going to want to put a bacta patch on that, y’know.”

They each took a step back from each other and turned to find Poe and Finn leaning against one of the ship’s good wings.

“Poe, you’ve tried to walk away from the med bay with more cuts worse than this,” Jessika sighed. “I’ll survive.”

“You already did that,” he said. “I’m… uh--you did a great job out there, Black Leader.”

Jessika smirked and strode over to where he stood to softly punch him in the elbow. “Thanks, man,” she said. “And this whole reckless asshole thing isn’t so fun from the other side, is it?” Turning to grin back at Rey, she made her way to join the rest of the pilots trickling back into the base, no doubt getting ushered straight to Dr. Kalonia and her legion of medical droids.

* * *

 

The evening following the Galantos mission, the General collected the entirety of the Resistance back into the situation room for a briefing. It was a tight fit, and many of the mechanics and off-duty analysts were forced to sit on the floor between where the rest of them had pulled up chairs. In many of their experiences, Jessika’s included, an unscheduled base-wide meeting like this could run far longer than anything they were used to, and it paid to be early and be prepared. 

She had managed to squeeze enough seats for herself, Rey, Finn, and Poe against the wall opposite the analyst bench stations--a strategic position that both kept her away from Kaydel and the four of them a couple groups over from the mechanics. Finn had mentioned to her after Kalonia had thrown a bacta patch on her face that there had been an incident between Poe and that young freckled kid who’d zapped life back into the old astromech she’d brought with her from the New Republic fleet. She’d had questions but the look on his face had insisted that she not ask, at least not then.

Time to ask more questions was a blessing.

There had been a single moment after the second squadron of TIE fighters had jumped them on the mission where all she could do was stare at her hands around the controls. The two separate sets of orders she had been given--land and wait for a rendezvous or jump to hyperspace--had the same likely outcome. It had been a matter of choosing how she wanted to go, getting shot down after peeling off from the group or ripping apart at lightspeed. And her brain wouldn’t let herself make the decision--if she didn’t decide, then she wouldn’t die.

But the astromech had started squealing to _do something_ , and the rest of their fleet was already making the jump. So why the kriff not join them--if she were going to go out on a mission, like hell it would be at the hands of the First Order.

Of course the X-wing complained and groaned the entire time. Pieces ripped off that had been half-blown from their screws by the firefight and over the noise the astromech kept calculating the odds of jumping back out of hyperspace in one piece, a new statistic gracing her dashboard screen every ten seconds. She tried not to look. The percentage in her favor was dropping at a near-consistent rate and while she’d never been a spiritual woman aside from a casual recognition of the Force, she started making promises to no one in particular.

_I’ll be the bigger person with Kaydel and stop avoiding her all the time. I’ll eat more vegetables. I’ll call Nai-Nai twice a week instead of once and try to speak more Dandoranian with her. I’ll stop being a coward and tell Rey how my stomach’s all in knots about her. I just gotta get back to D’Qar--_

And here she was. Back on D’Qar: avoiding Kaydel, avoiding the leafy green concoction at dinner, avoiding a Dandoranian refresher course with C3PO. Not to mention having already done everything in her power to avoid confessing anything to Rey. It had almost come out on the tarmac holding her face in her hands, but the words had gotten stuck on the brambles in her throat that had sprouted there after Lucia, that had grown even thicker after Kaydel.

But there was time. She was alive with her feet on the ground and she had enough time now that she could waste a small bit of it hiding a little longer.

The idle chatter died when Ackbar and the General entered the room--they looked more somber and stoic than usual at these sorts of briefings, and the anxious clench of everyone’s stomachs was visible in the thin set of their mouths.

“We all knew this day was coming,” the General said. “Between the interception of Commander Dameron’s mission to Dantooine and the complications from yesterday, it has become increasingly evident that the Ileenium system is no longer safe as a base for our operations. We need to find a new location elsewhere in the galaxy before the First Order feels it had recuperated enough to stage a full invasion of D’Qar.”

Snap raised his hand. “How long are we thinking that would be?”

“No way to know for certain,” Ackbar said. “So we need to act quickly. Our analyst teams have come up with a short list of lesser-known inhabitable moons that would make viable candidates, and we need a team to scout them out and report back so we can begin the move.” Jessika had always liked Ackbar’s big expressive eyes, but when they turned to their corner, the golden color was suddenly the most unnerving hue in the system.

“The team has already been assembled, so don’t bother volunteering,” the General said. “But start packing your bunks. And stay alert. Dismissed.” The crowd got up to head to the exits, chairs loudly scraping on the floor and muttering among themselves--and even over the noise, the General was still able to order the four of them to sit back down.

“I think I know where this is going,” Poe sighed.

Once the room cleared, they were left alone with the General and Ackbar, as well as Statura and Ematt, and Jessika desperately wished that they could have this conversation standing up. The officers loomed over them, which was maybe how they wanted it, to convey the gravity of the task they were being given--but she could feel Finn and Rey starting to squirm as they waited for the speech to begin.

“Dameron, Pava,” the General said. “You are two of our best pilots but after recent events, neither of you are fit for combat flight. All four of you have proven yourselves more than capable of these sorts of sensitive non-combat missions, plus we already know you work well together as a unit.” She stared each of them down, and Jessika couldn’t tell if the pause was for emphasis or letting them say something. None of them risked it. “We know there are concerns about your well-being, especially regarding readiness for _any_ sort of mission, but we can’t spare this many from the other personnel. This is the best way that you can help the Resistance.”

There was so much information to unpack that Jessika could hardly get angry about being grounded for combat.

“But considering how this crew operated the last time they were together,” Statura said, “Lieutenant Bastian will be joining you to ensure you keep to protocol. Understood?”

They nodded and glanced quickly at each other as Ackbar outlined their departure schedule. The Millennium Falcon was to be in the air before sunrise tomorrow, earlier if the mechanics had finished their repairs ahead of time. In the meantime, they would pack as much of their bunks as they could to speed the process along upon their return.

“I hope wherever we end up is just as green as this,” Rey said in the hallway after the debriefing. “Or Takodana. I’ve had quite enough of deserts.”

Jessika wanted to reassure her that none of these moons would be anything like Jakku, but the officers hadn’t been joking when they said these moons weren’t well known. A number of planets they orbited she hadn’t even heard of, and of the ones she did recognize, she hadn’t realized more than half of them even had moons.

“Well, hopefully we can find something super wrong with any desert moons we see so that doesn’t happen,” Jessika said.

“Being a desert should be reason enough.”

Rey split off to her bunk to pack with a grin and a small wave, and once the door shut behind her, Jessika wanted to punch herself in the face. Or find Iolo and make him break her nose again. But she shoved the urge back down and jogged to catch up with Finn and Poe, who were still taking their sweet time to their own bunk.

“...wasn’t what I imagined the whole ‘tour of the galaxy’ to be,” Poe said, his head ducked down.

“This doesn’t have to be it.”

“I mean, before anything else happens--”

“Stop. You’re talking about it like it’s outside your control--”

“It is, though. Almost--”

This wasn’t a conversation she was supposed to be hearing. Thankfully they had arrived at her bunk and she ducked into the doorway, hoping that they hadn’t heard her behind them. What they had been talking about was beyond her--as she threw her clothes back in the bag that she had just unpacked from Dantooine, she guessed that there were maybe still complications from his time in the med bay, but it hadn’t sounded like any medical issue she’d ever encountered. A spike of worry slid through her bloodstream all the same.

And as much as she was concerned about Poe, she had to wonder about Finn as well. Finn, who had pulled her from the Galantos briefing to talk circles around a point he never ended up getting to before Rey came to the door. But it had something to do with Poe and her advice on the matter, and it had made his hands sweaty and his speech more quick and frantic than she had ever seen.

 _I hope he doesn’t think I’m a kriffing doctor_. But maybe it hadn’t been that. It could’ve been something else, of course, and considering that they were going to be stuck on a ship again together for the foreseeable future, he could probably find enough time to wade from the circle and find the words he wanted to say.

**********

The analysts had structured the short list that Ackbar gave them very particularly from the information they were able to gather from D’Qar. Based on a number of factors, each moon had been ranked from most to least favorable, and they were instructed to start at the top and work their way down. Once they found a location that had no significant deal breakers, they were to stop the scouting mission and alert the officer team that was where the base would be relocated.

“Ideally, we would be going to every one of these places,” Bastian said as he skimmed the list. “But time isn’t on our side. I talked to some of the analysts and they’re pretty sure something’s going to work out in the first five.”

The Falcon had broken through the D’Qar atmosphere and jumped to hyperspace only half an hour ago, and already the mission was giving her a headache. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Bastian, but he had an odd bend to his personality that grated on her after a while, and she couldn’t shake her annoyance that someone with a lower rank than her was essentially given babysitting duties.

“Where to first?” Poe asked from his spot stretched across the inset bench.

“The largest moon of Togoria,” Bastian read. “Thank stars it’s just the moon.”

“Why’s that?” Rey called from the cockpit.

“Listen, if you’re looking to get clawed to death by a bunch of cat people, go right on ahead, but let me off before you do.” Bastian pinched the bridge of his nose.

Yes, he was well on his way to getting on her bad side. The flight to Togoria 1 (as they’d called it) was bound to take the better part of the day--Bastian was a supreme stickler to keeping to the hyperspace lanes and while the planet was about as far away from D’Qar as Galantos was, the route was much less direct. And she could understand his reasoning. Too much of that part of the Expansion Region and Mid Rim were uncharted to risk blowing through there, but she felt she had to act annoyed on principle on the matter. Add that to the irritation on how he was talking down to Rey, and the pros on risking flying into an uncharted star at lightspeed were starting to stack up if only to get away from him faster.

“I’m going to go see if Finn needs any help,” she said.

He probably didn’t, and she knew that. Other than Chewbacca and Skywalker, there wasn’t a person alive that knew the Falcon’s gunner better than Finn at this point--but Bastian wouldn’t be there, and she couldn’t elbow him in the face if they weren’t in the same room.

When she climbed down the ladder, however, she found that Finn wasn’t doing much of anything at all. He was sitting in the gunner seat, but his head was propped up on one of his hands as he stared at the rest of the contraption with a distant stare.

“Is it giving you that much trouble?” she said, and he nearly jumped out of the chair. “Didn’t meant to scare you--I definitely thought you’d heard me come down.”

“Yeah, well, I wasn’t all here I guess.”

“I’d say.”

The room was cramped, but there was enough cleared floor space near the window to fit her if she hugged her knees to her chest, so she claimed it as her own. Beyond the turrets of the blaster was the mesh of blues and violets of hyperspace, and it was beautiful enough that she wished the sight didn’t make her vaguely nauseous.

“So what are you doing down here?” he asked after a few minutes of silence. “I would’ve guessed avoiding Threepio, but he’s not here.”

“You’re close,” she said. “I needed some space from Bastian.”

“He seems nice.”

“We just don’t mesh well.”

“Okay.” He nodded to himself, ran his fingers over the buttons and triggers along the gunner’s controls. “This is sort of--um, really unrelated, but can I ask you something? It actually has to do with what I was trying to talk you about before you left.”

“I was actually planning on asking you about that.”

“Well then.” He frowned, but lightheartedly, the kind of frown you were meant to see with your head hanging upside down from the couch so you could see it for what it really was. The sense of humor and _goodness_ in him for someone who lived the vast majority of his life under the boot of the First Order never failed to throw people back on their heels. “It’s about Poe.”

“That much I got the first time around.”

“Right.” His mouth drew to one side, then the other. “I didn’t think it would be that hard to _say_ it. Because I already had. Not to you, though. I just…” Running his hands over his face, he made a grumbling noise and refocused his attention back on her. “So. Hypothetically.”

“All right.” With anyone else this would have been supremely frustrating, but Jessika only found it endearing.

“Hypothetically… say I had feelings for Poe.” It all came out in a jumble with hardly any space between the words. “Y’know. _Feelings_. Like--in love feelings.” He paused and glanced down at her, and she raised her eyebrows in reply. If he were waiting for her to give him a gay panic reaction, he was going to be waiting a very, very long time. “And--hypothetically--if Poe were not in the best state of mind and I were to mention I had those feelings--”

“Oh no, don’t do that,” she said hurriedly. “Definitely don’t do that.”

“What if I hypothetically already did?” His grimace was so pronounced that she could hardly see his eyes.

“Pfassk, Finn. Okay.” And to think she had thought her headache would ease, keeping him company. She leaned back against the wall panel and stared up at the arc of the room’s ceiling and the last chips of gray paint still clinging to the metal. “Can I ask why?”

“Why I told him? Hypothetically,” he added.

“Finn. Come on.”

“Jessika, _you_ come on.” He frowned at her for another half second before dropping the act, and she hoped he had realized by now those sorts of ideas with her were never good ones. “I always thought that if you were struggling it helped to know you had people that cared about you. And being in love with someone is caring about them a _lot_.”

Back on base, not a single member of the Resistance had guessed Finn’s age correctly--herself included. Iolo had even set up a sort of betting pool around it and however off you were determined how many credits you had to cough up. Everyone shot high. They wouldn’t have if they had been able to see how he slumped back against the gunner chair, foot fidgeting against the base of the seat, absently chewing at a cuticle.

“I know what you’re probably thinking,” he said, like he’d practiced giving this speech to a hundred other people in his head and was already tired of repeating himself. “And yeah, stormtroopers had affairs and they were secret about it. Some of them--some of them had feelings and were even more secret. But just with the officers. How was I supposed to know that wasn’t just a byproduct of being in the First Order?”

It was a well-practiced speech, glossy enough that the holes where he had omitted certain trains of thought weren’t visible unless she _really_ squinted; and even then the shapes of them escaped her. However patchy, the frame of it held true.

“What do you want me to tell you, man?” she asked.

“I--I don’t know!” he said. “Maybe… how badly did I mess up?”

If he had been part of the Resistance even a couple months longer, then he would have known that she was not the person to come to for relationship advice. _Incidentally_ , she thought about saying, _Karé once asked me for my thoughts on the mechanic she’d been seeing just so she could do the exact opposite_. It was amazing, really, how it all spread so quickly given that Poe was the only one who knew the details of her mishaps; everyone else was simply aware of the fact she was a mess.

Here Finn was, a mess, asking another mess for help in maneuvering out of The Great Big Mess Called Life--as Poe had once called it in the immediate aftermath with Kaydel.

But Finn didn’t need to know that. He was looking to her, misguided as he was, and passing the buck in a friend’s Hour of Messiness was just lazy.

“He didn’t reciprocate, I take it?” she asked.

“Well--no?” His brow furrowed as he thought. “That wasn’t--I mean--”

“Slow down.” She held up a hand and his mouth snapped shut. “Easier question: has he acted any differently around you since then?”

There was a pause, a further-furrowed brow, and he shook his head.

“Then you’re probably fine.” She tried for a grin and was happy to find it slipped on easily and that one found him too, even briefly.  A twitch of his lips as reassurance.

She wished that he could have heard the way Poe talked about him before they all set off for Takodana, back when they thought the miraculous defecting stormtrooper was dead in the sands of Jakku. Any youngling listening to Poe tell that story would have thought Finn was the one whose hands sank into the center of the galaxy at the beginning of time and twisted it into motion.

(She couldn’t say that she was surprised by this turn of events, then. She just couldn’t say what she was at all.)

“Pava!” Bastian’s voice echoed down from the ladder to the corridor. “Rey’s asking if you could come up to the cockpit--the intersection with the Parlemian Trade Route is coming up--”

“Yeah, I’m coming,” she called up. “Don’t get your banthas all riled up, Lieutenant, _kriff_ …” She jumped up to her feet, careful to avoid knocking her head on any of the mechanical equipment lining the walls.

Before her foot hit the first rung, Finn turned around and tapped her on the wrist, the closest part of her he could reach. “Thanks, Jess. Really.”

“An unnecessary gesture, just so you know--but you’re welcome. I--” She stopped herself, closed her mouth back into another tight grin. “You’re welcome,” she repeated, hopping quickly up the ladder before she could say something she would end up regretting.

**********

The first word to come to mind when they landed on Togoria 1 was “dismal,” but Jessika had seen dismal before. The streets outside at the foot of Corulag’s urban hubs were dismal. Iolo’s attempts at classic Keshian cuisine was dismal. Togoria 1 tipped the scales a tad further than that and as she sifted through the possible options to put on the report they would inevitably have to write, the only one that even came close was “ _kriffing_ dismal.”

It still didn’t cut it.

“This isn’t… too bad, right?” Rey said after they’d disembarked.

Rey smiled over at her hopefully, and Jessika let out a single defeated laugh. The section of the moon where the Falcon had touched down had been specifically designated by the Resistance analysts in charge of the project as the most favorable landscape for a base, but she could see absolutely no strategic value in the flat, barren swathe of land before them. Deep cracks spiderwebbed across the ground and the sprigs of grasses reaching up through the intersections looked even drier than what they’d seen on Dantooine, dry enough that she wondered if they were already dead.

“Isn’t this supposed to be midday?” Bastian squinted up at the sky. Dark clouds almost violet in color blotted out most of the sunlight and colored the whole scene purple. “Nighttime would be creepy out here. D’Qar gets dark enough and we at least know what’s out in the forest.”

Finn was squinting at the list with Poe over his shoulder. He glanced at him in a stuttering sort of way before bringing the paper closer to his face, muttering about the bad light. “There’s nothing here about _why_ this was supposed to be the top choice.”

“Well…” Poe sighed. “The air’s breathable and the climate won’t burn or freeze us to death. Heavy cloud cover is kind of strategic, plus no one risks flying this way and possibly crashing on Togoria.” He shrugged. “Bastian was right. Togorians aren’t friendly.”

His voice sounded dead even though he made his face go through the motions--it was the combination she expected from him after a long mission or when the insomnia took hold of his wrist and dragged him around the base at odd hours of the night. She had heard it before, but not quite like this. The lilt of his speech when she’d run into him those times hinted at a finish line he could see, the sleep he would eventually get that would reanimate him from the bones up, but it was missing now. The words ran flatly across his tongue, lethargic.

“This problem though,” Poe continued, pointing off to the dark line of the horizon. “The limited data wouldn’t tell them about… this.”

The consensus came quickly. Despite the advantages its position within the galaxy offered, Togoria 1 simply did not have enough natural resources or existing infrastructure to support the needs of an operational base. And with the next moon far off any hyperspace lanes, Jessika put her foot down and declared they were spending the night here.

“I’m tired, you’re all tired, and I’m not having any one of us try to navigate around the Core half-asleep.” No one had fought the notion, and for once she was glad not to have to snap the arguments back with her teeth.

The feeling didn’t last long.

She had forgotten--or perhaps she had been too preoccupied the first time around to take conscious notice--that the Falcon only had three bunks. Each of the cots in the cramped rooms could have held two people if, as Bastian put it, they tried really hard and believed in themselves, but she wasn’t sure if he was referring to each other or the mattresses, and asking was only going to bring back that headache.

“Look,” Bastian said. “Gods know I can sleep wherever I decide to close my eyes. Why don’t Finn and Dameron take those two, and you ladies can share the last one.” Both she and Rey must have given him a look because he quickly followed up, “Y’know, because you’re smaller. Not--nevermind. Pava, please don’t yell at me.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” she said. (Which, false: already dreamt of it; currently dreaming of it again and in new creative ways because now she has to share a _bed_ with Rey because of his bright ideas.)

The rest of them retired to their respective quarters without much ceremony, mumbling goodnight to each other and closing the doors behind them quickly--or, in Bastian’s case, heading back to the cockpit to see if the captain’s chair came with a reclining mechanism. For a brief flash, Jessika was blindingly angry with Finn and Poe for leaving her alone with Rey in these circumstances, her thoughts a constant stream of exclamation points and question marks that would hardly translate into anything intelligible. Rey seemed frozen to the spot as well, and Jessika wondered if in her lonely life she had ever had to share a sleeping space this tight with anyone before.

“So--um,” Rey said. “I just need to get changed for bed. Sleep clothes, y’know.”

“Oh right. Me too, no big deal.” She shrugged and reached down to grab her bag. “I’ll just go change in the hall while you--”

A crash rang from around the corner, followed immediately by Bastian letting loose a litany of curses that would peel any remaining paint this piece of junk ship had left.

“I guess that seat doesn’t recline,” Jessika snorted.

“He might come looking for a new place to sleep,” Rey said. “Why don’t you--I mean. We can change at the same time, I think, if we have our backs to each other.”

 _Kriff_. “Good idea.” She fumbled over the couple other bags that had been shoved in the corners around the door and closed it behind her. There was only about a foot of space between them and after exchanging what may have been the most awkward grins Jessika had ever witnessed, they turned their backs to each other.

Jessika forgot how to move her fingers. The room was so close and quiet, muffling any other noises on the other side of the wall, that the sound of Rey’s shirt sliding against her skin as she pulled it off made her ears ring. And again, Rey slipping something else on, that same sound shook the air around them--would it sound the same if it were Jessika’s hands there instead of fabric? How would her hands look against the bare skin of her hips?

“Are you almost done?” Rey asked quickly.

“Um--almost. Almost…” Her arms were shaking by then, and she hurriedly pulled her sweater over her head, leaving the tank top she’d worn underneath. The athletic shorts from the Academy weren’t the most attractive item in her wardrobe, but they would have to do, rips in the mesh and all. “Okay, I’m good.”

More lies: Jessika was far from good. Rey’s small frame was draped in one of the older-issue Resistance standard undershirts, the olive long-sleeved cotton piece Poe always insisted on wearing without anything else like it was intended. The sleeves went far past her hands so that only the tips of her longest fingers were visible.

“I have shorts on underneath this,” Rey blurted. “Snap lent this to me when I first got to D’Qar. I just never gave it back. That’s why it’s so big.” She swallowed, tucked her hair behind her ear--which was down out of her buns for once and long and wavy and _stars_ , Jessika had to get ahold of herself.

“So. Um.”

The bed shouldn’t have been that daunting. Where had she been a day ago? Shooting down TIE fighters from the First Order? Dodging certain death while the fire of it chased her and singed the heels of her shoes? And it was _this_ that gave her pause? The fearlessness needed of a squadron leader sat poorly upon her shoulders.

“Uh. Do you--” Rey grimaced. “Do you want the wall or--”

“I don’t care, I’m fine with whatever.”

“I am also fine with whatever!”

“Okay. So, um. I’ll just…” Jessika hopped on the cot and scooted quickly to the cold steel edge; it was much smaller than she had anticipated looking at it standing up.

When Rey wriggled in beside her, the space between them--almost the lack thereof--radiated a volume of body heat Jessika hadn’t expected. It wasn’t her size; Kaydel had been tiny and a walking furnace. Her thoughts had waved away basic biology, insisting that Rey couldn’t run so hot if she lived so long on a desert. She would have had to adapt somehow, pluck a miracle out of the Force and give herself cold hands. Cold feet, too, if she could manage it.

But Rey’s presence next to her was stiflingly warm through every extremity. They kicked the thin blanket to the floor and quickly found that it was impossible for the two of them to each lie on their back in the space that they had without touching--the fleeting moments of contact stang like burns, but pleasant, and after the panic faded and she could see that Togoria 1 hadn’t fallen out of orbit, the parts of her skin that had burned wanted it back.

The lamp had clicked off after they’d tried to settle in and she could see the outline of Rey’s profile with the light streaming through the cracks in the door. She watched the silhouette of her eyelashes as she blinked in the dark, jumping out of her skin when they were suddenly _here_ , in front of her when Rey turned her head.

“I thought I was tired, but I can’t sleep,” she whispered. Her breath brushed against Jessika’s nose in the close space.

“A lot on your mind?” Jessika turned so she was lying on her shoulder and Rey mirrored her--they were face to face now, their arms curled against their chests. Angled away from the bit of light they had, Rey’s pupils expanded their reach even further, and Jessika hoped that maybe it was still a little too dark to see how badly she was staring. “I mean, of course there is with--well. Everything.”

“Yeah.” Rey sighed. “Can I… ask you a personal question? You don’t have to answer.”

“What?”

“I probably shouldn’t even be asking--”

“ _What?_ ”

“Did you… grow up with your grandmother?”

 _Oh._ “She, um.” Nobody in the Resistance knew: Poe had the vague shape of it, an outline from the night they boozed it up on his X-wing, and Kaydel had asked but she shoved the question under the bed and lied on the spot about telling her some other time. Wasn’t this the sort of thing people needed practice to talk about? She was so rusty and the tang of iron sat across her whole tongue. “She raised me, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Rey nodded. “I just--I had heard the other pilots talking after we got back. Snap, mainly. He said he hadn’t known you were from Corulag.” The implication between the lines glowed neon: _if he didn’t know your home world, he couldn’t know much of anything else past that._

“I don’t talk about where I came from.”

“Why?”

Jessika’s eyes had adjusted as much as they were going to, and the grayscale view of Rey’s face was coaxing her words forward with alarming ease. Her heart thumped in her chest. “I didn’t want their pity.” She swallowed past the lump that had crept up her throat, hoping to push it down. It didn’t budge enough to relieve the pressure completely, just to let a little more air through to her lungs. “My parents were civilian casualties in the last stand against the Empire on Corulag. I was only a couple months old.”

“Oh, Jessika.” Rey’s arm moved slightly, rustling against the lone sheet still covering the mattress. Hesitated. But then something warm was latched around Jessika’s hand, and it was Rey’s and maybe her heart stopped. “This isn’t pity, by the way.”

It took her a couple seconds to remember how to speak. “What is it, then?”

Rey didn’t answer, but she did grip at her hand more tightly and with both hands now. The close quiet of the room was pressing in on her ears, overwhelming--both hyperaware of the silence and drowned out by the sound of her own breathing. Rey’s breathing. Rey’s eyes that still shone in the dark.

“Something else.” Her voice wavered and it traveled all the way down to her fingers readjusting their hold on Jessika’s hand.

“Yeah?”

Rey grinned in her eyes, the kind that lit up her whole face. “Yeah.”

And Jessika wanted to deflect, make a joke-- _you’re being really specific and it’s_ so _helpful_ \--break whatever was holding this moment together so she could roll over and sleep and collect herself, practice her refined art of not thinking about it so surviving the rest of the mission with her composure intact wouldn’t be such the impossible feat--

Something warm and wet bumped against the tip of her nose.

“Oh no,” Rey murmured. “I--I missed, I think, but I also didn’t mean to _do_ that--”

(Pause. Rewind. Pause again: the bump on the nose, the soft pressure there. The push of an exhale on the bridge of it, rolling down to her cheeks.)

“--I mean,” Rey kept babbling, “I was thinking about it--oh, that’s not better, is it--”

“You missed?” Jessika’s heartbeat was bruisingly strong; it was about to make her teeth start vibrating and she hoped it was all in her head because she couldn’t let Rey feel how wound she was with the jittery sort of tension that didn’t lay well on her nerves. But her hands shook anyway as she pulled one from the cocoon Rey had made for them, as she brought it to the side of Rey’s face, and then even harder as she leaned across the pillow and gently pressed their lips together.

Rey froze, and for a moment Jessika was terrified that she had misread what had happened or that the darkened room had played tricks on all her senses--she pulled back, an apology already halfway formed when she caught Rey’s face. The soft shock, curling up into a grin.

“But _you_ didn’t.”

Jessika couldn’t think of a single thing to say to that--her brain had shorted out and the fizz of sparks crackled in her ear, but Rey’s face grew closer and her hands wove themselves into her hair and they kissed again. And kept going, slowly at first and on the verge of hesitant; but it was as if someone had pushed them down a hill because the momentum of it was beyond them, the same forces keeping all the pieces of the galaxy from whipping away into Wild Space. Their legs tangled together and Rey was making soft sounds into her mouth every time their tongues met. Jessika didn’t know what to do with herself, with her hands: she wrapped them around Rey’s back, kissed up her neck and jawline along the pulse point. The heartbeat under her lips fluttered maddeningly.

“ _Jess_.”

“We--we can slow down,” she gasped, moving back down to her collarbone. “I don’t want to push--”

“Later, later…”

One of Rey’s warm, warm hands crawled up the back of Jessika’s shirt and her fingers trailed up her spine. She arched into it, rolling so she could straddle Rey’s hips, look at her properly. In the lone beams of light from the door, the flush of her face was clear, reddening further as Jessika took the cue and slipped her own hands into the cavern of Snap’s old shirt.

“ _Oh._ ”

“Rey…” She leaned forward and pressed a kiss to her temple, her cheek, and then the corner of her mouth. “What do you want?”

“I already…” Rey wrapped a hand around the back of Jessika’s head and pulled her down into a heated kiss, mouth already open and pliant and she melted into her touch. The arm still along her back painting a hot line across her skin. “I thought I was alone--”

“No, no… never--"

“You didn’t let me finish!” She smiled under her, all shining white teeth in the dark. And her hands, small as they were, they roamed from their holds without leaving, not actually: the pressure was still there, the warmth too, and when they finally cupped either side of her face, the reverence they held enveloped her entire body.

“This is…” Rey said slowly. “All this is okay?”

The question was too simple for there not to be a hidden root down to a thousand other questions kept close to her chest. “Of course.” She leaned down and kissed the tip of her nose, saving the memory of the way she laughed next to Nai-Nai’s favorite stories from Dandoran and the swoop of her stomach when Carth first let her take a Y-wing out of the hangar. “It’s _so_ okay.”

Another smile lit up Rey’s face as she hugged around Jessika’s back and pulled her down onto the mattress, and they tangled themselves together like that, kissing until sleep colored the edges of their eyes with their lips still touching.

* * *

 

Finn woke the next morning with a knot in his back and dull headache that wrapped around the back of his eyes--the Falcon had just jolted off the ground of Togoria 1, if he was judging the push of inertia correctly, and he almost missed when the next step on a mission required a roundtable. At least then they wouldn’t take off before everyone had gotten up. It felt inconsiderate, even if it probably wasn’t.

The doors to the bunks where Poe, Jessika, and Rey had slept were already open and there was some vague sort of yelling from the direction of the cockpit. Bastian and Rey, it sounded like, arguing over the most pragmatic route to Sernpidal. As he listened closer, it became evident that they were having two separate arguments at the same time: Bastian, debating the best route, and Rey, wondering why they should be going there at all. Their shouting garbled together so tightly until he could hardly pick apart whose voice was whose.

The Millennium Falcon had no supply of caf, and he desperately needed caf.

Or perhaps he didn’t. His brain slowly processed what was taking place: a hand balling up fabric from the front of his shirt, a force walking him back into the supply closet, and then the sight of Jessika’s face stretched tight around some source of tension he couldn’t identify. Was she livid? Stressed, maybe. He’d certainly seen her in a wide variety of negative and frightening emotions but this one was hard to place on the chart he’d sketched up in his head.

Regardless: by the time he had been backed into the far wall of the closet completely, the energy of three full cups of caf stretched through his limbs.

“Good morning to you too, sunshine,” he said.

“You knew, didn’t you?”

“Knew what?”

“Please don’t play dumb,” she snapped. So she was angry. At least he knew now. “Who told you? It wasn’t Poe, was it? It couldn’t have been--”

“Jessika.” He put his hands on both of her shoulders and managed to put enough distance between them that her hand was wrenched free of his shirt. “Told me _what_?”

Her frown curled down dramatically--if the rest of her face hadn’t been ablaze with a fury legendary among the Resistance, it would have been comical. “See--okay. I’m careful. I know I don’t _need_ to be, but it’s a force of habit, y’know? Corulag wasn’t as progressive as Coruscant or Corellia or--y’know, most of the galaxy. It’s my choice. And I know Poe didn’t say anything so if Kaydel kriffing found you--”

“I literally have no kriffing idea what you’re talking about!”

Her mouth hung open for a moment until she stuttered, “W--wait a second.”

“Yes, _thank you_ ,” he said, throwing his hands up in the air. “What have I been saying!”

“I first thought you came to me about your Poe problem because you were clueless and in a bind,” she said. And she started to try to pace in the tiny space allotted in the closet, but it meant she was stepping over old wrenches and oil rags and generally couldn’t move too far without bumping back into him. “But then when I--well. This morning. You’re in love with Poe--did you come to me because you knew I was gay?”

“I came to you because you’re Poe’s best friend,” he said. “And I have absolutely _no_ idea why you being gay would make me more likely to seek out advice from you!” She made a face and he tried to mirror it back in response--the world outside of the First Order made as little sense sometimes as the weird dreams Zeroes would try to tell them over breakfast, even now. “And plus--you’re never particularly that _gay_. You weren’t either one of those days I tried to talk to you. You were actually pretty grumpy yesterday.”

She took a moment to stare at the closet wall, clasping her hands together in front of her mouth. Frozen so completely still that Finn wondered if time had warped wrong around a hyperspace jump and left him in a weird pocket of space, stranded with a bewildered Jessika for the rest of eternity.

“Finn,” she said calmly. Too calmly. “What do you think ‘gay’ means?”

“What is this, a vocabulary quiz?”

“Finn.”

“Fine,” he sighed. “‘Gay’ means cheerful, which you _aren’t_. Ever.” She ran a hand over her face and he suddenly felt like he had missed a step on a staircase. “Why are you doing that? Why are you making that face at me?”

She grumbled into her hands, shifting into a pair of overly-peppy finger guns so seamlessly that it was almost alarming. “Okay. So in the First Order, what did you call it when two men were together physically?”

“Uh…having sex?”

“No--if a man only had sex with other men?”

“Picky? What--stop. Jessika. _Jessika_.”

“Stars….” she sighed. Both of her hands came to her hips and it looked as if she were chewing slightly at the inside of her cheek. “Well, I’m sorry for pushing you in here, first of all, because if you don’t know that then…” She grinned at him, which did absolutely nothing to put him at ease--she had that way about her. “If someone is called ‘gay,’ it means they’re only attracted to their same gender. If you go around acting like it means ‘happy,’ you’re going to sound like you’re from the Old Republic, all right?”

It all started to click into place, albeit slowly. He stared at her as the cogs kept turning, and she stared back, waiting for him to say something. But she could wait. Jumping him like this the second he emerged from his bunk and demanding a quick answer had really been an unreasonable expectation.

“ _You_ said _you’re_ gay,” he said. “And you think Kaydel told me? When would she have--why… oh. _Oh._ ”

“All right,” she grumbled.

“You and her were a thing, weren’t you! That’s why you got so upset with Threepio!”

“I said _all right_.”

“Sorry,” he said quickly. “But why did you think I knew?”

“Well you’re Rey’s best kriffing friend, aren’t you?” she hissed.

For a moment, he thought he’d misheard the words that had come out of his mouth with the way her response didn’t appear to match up. Stars, had he needed that caf. The staring contest kept up as he assembled the puzzle pieces of the conversation-- _Jessika is gay, Jessika thought I knew she was gay, and Jessika knows I’m Rey’s best friend._ Pieces were missing, arguably the most important ones--and then it hit him and his face was about to split open with the smile that overtook it.

“Did you two--”

“Keep your damn voice down, gods!” she whispered, grimacing. “Yes, okay!”

“Ohoho, man, she had it _bad_ for you--”

“Shut _up_ , Finn. And you’re not really in a position to talk, are you?”

He held up his hands in forfeit--and while she did have a point, he still had cause to want to celebrate something good coming out of all this. He was about to tell her just that when she pushed open the door and stomped back to the main cabin.

Rey deserved this after everything she’d been through; and so, it seemed, Jessika did as well, if her first instinct after an occasion like this was to reenact the Imperial Inquisition, a potential betrayal of trust tainting anything joyful it touched.

Of course, though, while he followed Jessika’s path to the rest of the group, his thoughts strayed to Poe. How he’d heard him talking incoherently in his sleep when Finn woke up from an unpleasant dream of TIE fighters and A-wings.

“Well, well,” Bastian said from the other side of the cabin when Finn plopped down by the holo-chess table. “Look who’s finally up!”

“Look who got kicked out of the cockpit.”

“Okay, fair enough,” he sighed.

Jessika, as it turned out, had made a beeline for the cockpit after leaving him in the supply closet, making a command decision that hadn’t quite agreed with either point Bastian or Rey had been trying to argue. Yes, Jessika insisted, they had to go to Sernpidal; and no, it was kriffing stupid not to pick up the Gordian Reach from the Parlemian Trade Route, why the _pfassk_ would they have wanted to double back towards the Deep Core?

“Was that exactly how it went?” Finn asked, snorting.

“Believe it or not,” Poe said from the inset bench, “there was actually more swearing. But only at Bastian.” His voice still rang flat and the circles under his eyes had sunk even deeper than they were the night before. Bluer, too, and tiptoeing towards dark violet at the corners where they met his nose.

“No, I believe you.”

The three of them sat in silence for about an hour, at which point Poe rose from his spot and plodded back towards the bunks. The clang of the door echoed distantly down the hall and Bastian eyed Finn immediately.

“What happened to him on Dantooine?”

Finn shrugged, hoping that Bastian would drop the subject soon enough, though he had a feeling he wouldn’t be that lucky. Jessika’s frustration with him was becoming contagious--why did he have to know? Wasn’t it enough of a sign to stop asking questions when Poe was in the state that he was after an unprecedented stint in an isolated med bay? The tightness in his chest ebbed when he saw the slouch of Bastian’s shoulders. Of course he would be worried, Finn reprimanded himself. You didn’t fight alongside someone, under someone like the Resistance corps had and not sow seeds of affection. Bastian knew it was taboo to ask, which was why he waited until he had Finn alone.

Because Finn would likely know--apparently the theme of the morning.

“I’ve flown with Poe for a while now,” he said. “And he’s always been a little hard on himself--which you’d never guess, right? He’s got enough confidence and all that so you _don’t_ notice, but it’s there. But he’s measuring himself up to something, all right, and that’s a look I’ve seen when he misses his mark real bad. Never seen it last this long, though.”

“He didn’t tell me what happened,” Finn said. “I don’t think he’s told anyone.”

“Well if he didn’t tell _you_ …” Bastian sighed.

“What?”

But Bastian shook his head, waved his hand in front of his face. “Nothing. But can I ask you something?”

He doubted that it was really nothing but went ahead and motioned for Bastian to ask whatever was eating at him.

“How _did_ you and Poe escape the Finalizer? I mean, I’ve heard his story a hundred kriffin’ times but he’s been known to embellish a little for the sake of narrative, y’know? Especially when it makes someone else look good.”

Finn remembered the looks he’d gotten after Poe introduced him to the General after Takodana. _This is Finn_ , and then he sensed thirty pairs of eyes in his direction with heads kept down, attempting subtlety. “Um--”

“That didn’t come out right,” he said. “I wasn’t trying to put you down or anything. The story’s pretty unbelievable by anyone’s standards. I just want to know why he had those stars in his eyes every time he opened his mouth and your name came out.”

 _Stars in his eyes._ Finn’s stomach flopped over three times in quick succession, threatening to do so again as he imagined the bright fire of a sun lighting his dark eyes all golden--a flash of it sparking when his mouth curled around the name he gave him when his attention should have been focused anywhere else.

His stomach flopped over again, slower this time, lined with lead.

“Okay,” he sighed. “So it started after they brought us back from Jakku…”

********** 

The second moon of Sernpidal held more immediate promise than their last stop--for one, it wasn’t a barren wasteland. The deciduous forest where they landed gave way to flat grasslands, and Jessika had spotted a sizeable body of water during the descent. “There doesn't seem to be any abandoned buildings to use as a barracks,” Bastian said. “At least not here. But we could build some, easy.”

“Is the General going to want to go that route?” Finn said. “Seems like a lot of work for something temporary.”

“Don’t ask her about Hoth, then,” Poe sighed before following Bastian further out into the plains. He shrugged the pack of water and food for the day’s planned expedition back onto his shoulder and kept his head down.

Jessika jogged to catch up with him, clapping him on the back to get his attention. Muttered something to him with their heads close together, throwing him a smirk that went unreciprocated.

A moment later, Rey was tugging at his elbow. “C’mon, don’t you want to see this wide view of the area Bastian’s been going on about?” The sky was clear, allowing the strong beat of the sun to color her cheeks--but it was more than just the sun. He ran beside her to take a spot behind where Jessika and Poe had fallen in, and there was a noticeable lightness in the way the balls of her feet sprung off the ground.

“ _So_ …” he said pointedly under his breath.

“What? Oh,” she said. “That whole argument with Bastian from earlier, I’m sure that’ll come up later--” But then she saw his eyebrows shot up halfway to his hairline and her eyes flickered to the back of Jessika’s head. “Did she tell you?” she whispered.

“Accidentally. I was half asleep.” Rey laughed, and he took the cue to loop his arm in hers while their group rustled through the high grass. “I’m very happy for you,” he murmured and pressed a chaste kiss to her temple.

“Oh, stop,” she laughed again.

“How did--”

“I’m not telling you!” she whispered. “It’s… it’s _private_ , Finn!”

“Fair enough.”

He snuck a glance at her as she smiled to herself, bit her lip. The center of his chest thrummed with the sight, warmed by it: the specific sense of her bewilderment at the turn of events was suddenly so evident to him that it was as if he were feeling it himself. And if he could make himself forget the real reason for their mission and the gloomy waves rolling off Poe’s back, the moment would have epitomized a peacefulness he wasn’t sure he’d ever known. A slight breeze drew waves across the grass in the distance where the land arced up into a small hill; the sound of it melded with the slower beat of their own movement through the expanse. They were warm and Rey was smiling and the wide clear sky above them held the curves of Sernpidal and Dobido, its other moon, muted through the atmosphere.

If this was where they were going to end up, Finn was certain he would be okay with it.

They trekked through the field without a word between the five of them until Bastian stopped so suddenly that Jessika and Poe nearly walked into him. When they turned around, Jessika was literally holding her tongue between her front teeth to keep from saying anything. Any other day, Poe would have probably laughed at the sight, but his mouth only pressed into a thin line that could hardly be called a grin.

“What’s the verdict, then?” Finn asked after a tense half minute.

“Even in a wide view, there’s nothing,” Bastian grumbled. “The forest is so dense that any shelters would have to be outside of it--”

“It’s a pretty big moon, though,” Poe said.

“And we don’t have time to check all of it.” Bastian ran his fingers through his short hair and sighed. “I still think it’s pretty viable.”

Finn noticed he looked anywhere but Rey when he said so--and apparently so did she.

“Can we talk about Dobido now, then?” she said, pointing to the smaller figure in the sky. While Sernpidal had its fair share of blues and greens across its surface, Dobido was a crisscross of reds and grays with lights blinking across the gap of space. “I heard the General talking about it--the entire moon is a city _full_ of people with leftover sympathies to the Empire. Why would we want a base next to that?”

“I didn’t know that about Dobido, but she’s got a point,” Jessika said. “This doesn’t even have decent cloud cover like Togoria 1 did.”

“We’re lucky that the sentient species in the rest of the Ileenium system aren’t advanced enough to get leveraged by the First Order or compromise our missions but this… I don’t like this.” A grimace twitched onto Poe’s face before he looked back at the laces of his shoes, digging a toe of one into the soft earth.

Finn gazed back up at Dobido and swore he could see flashes of the backs of starship engines coming in to land there, even despite the distance. “Why did you think this was a good idea?”

Bastian rolled his eyes so hard his entire body spun with it. “Look, I know my galactic geography. I can tell you that two-thirds of the rest of these options they gave us are a total waste of our time. The third moon on the list orbits Esfandia--Esfandia doesn’t have a star! It’s lost out in space! How would we survive there?”

“They survived Hoth,” Poe said. “I know I’m repeating myself but Hoth wasn’t anyone’s definition of viable either.”

“Well…to be fair, the Rebel Alliance had more resources that we did,” Jessika said. “I remember reading they had crews go and assemble a bunch of bases on various planets so they could switch more quickly.”

Poe nodded and turned his attention back to his shoes--Finn didn’t actively listen to the rest of the discussion as it wasn’t one he felt he could contribute well to anyway. While he wasn’t new to strategy by any means, the added element of “galactic geography” still was, and his time was better spent somewhere other than nodding along to what everyone else was saying. He unlooped his arm with Rey’s and approached Poe, placing a hand at his elbow.

“How are you feeling?” he asked quietly.

Poe only shook his head.

“Do you want to take a walk? They’ll be fine.”

“Oh, I know they will,” Poe said. There was a smile there, however brief. “But yeah, that sounds like a good idea.”

Finn motioned to Rey that they would be back and set out on a path parallel to the line of the trees where they’d landed the Falcon. Behind them, their three heads were still visible overtop of the grass, a beacon to guard against getting lost--Poe checked a number of times, quick glances over his shoulder to ensure even Bastian’s tall frame hadn’t been swallowed. The fear in the air around them spiked whenever he did, sharp and sour.

“I’m having the same nightmare every night,” Poe said. He wasn’t staring down at his feet anymore, instead eyeing the line of the horizon, squinting at it like he couldn’t get it quite in focus. “It started in the med bay. I’m flying a TIE fighter and I get shot down by an A-wing.”

Even the simple description dredged up flashes of Finn’s nightmare from the night before, of a TIE fighter older and clunkier than the ones he’d seen in his time as a stormtrooper and the A-wings that had taken to it like a swarm.

“And it’s not like when we took the TIE fighter. I’m wearing the black pilot suit. The same A-wing shoots me down every night. Green Four.”

“Does that mean something?”

Poe swallowed and hiked the bag he was still carrying back onto his shoulder, as it had managed to slip. “I didn’t mean to do what I did to Drem. You know that, right?”

“Of course--”

“It’s--it’s hard to explain.”

“Try me.”

Poe gazed over at him for a moment, the heavy kind Finn remembered from planning the attack on Starkiller Base. He wanted to take his hand--it had felt so right when Poe had reached for him after the run-in with Drem, but that had been Poe’s choice, not his. The urge stayed and his palm felt too exposed without Poe’s against it.

“I wanted to help the squadron and I was powerless to. Our tactics weren’t working. My head wasn’t screwed on straight, either. The fear and anger were starting to come up again and taking it out on the General wasn’t going to help anything. And then I had the idea, y’know? And it suggested everything I would have to do to get past all the hurdles.” Poe swallowed again and wrapped his arms around his stomach. They had stopped walking. Instead of the horizon those dark eyes, starless, were intent upon his own. Heavier still. “I had to get the ignition switch put back into Ello’s ship. Refuel it. Sneak out a flight suit. The mechanics and ground crew keep all that on lockdown.” He held up his hands between them. “But that doesn’t matter when you…”

“Poe…”

“I was weak.” The disgust in his voice hit Finn with a wave of nausea. “It offered me an easy path and I froze that poor kid. That’s kriffing terrifying, being frozen like that. Kylo Ren got me like that on Jakku and I _still_ did it to Drem. I’m no better than they are.”

“Yes you are.” His hands went to Poe’s face--he stopped himself halfway. _Too much, too much_. He settled for the base of his neck where it curved down into his shoulders. “Do you think they ever felt guilty?”

“There are rumors, y’know.” Poe’s hand drew up towards his chest again, thumbing the hard plate of his breastbone. And Finn tracked his gaze as it wandered away from his and around the circle of his face, his hairline, just above his ears and back again--a curve that never doubled back on itself until it mapped every part of him Poe could see. “About the fall of Darth Vader. No one but Luke knows what really happened.” There was a warmth around Finn’s wrist, and when he looked, the hand that had been at Poe’s chest was laid there, soft. Nudging up the sleeve of the jacket so he could touch the skin.

Finn felt Poe opening wide for him, just standing there, and he hadn’t thought that he would’ve been able to love him more--the swell of it rushed up and spilled over his bottom lip and for a silent second he was drowning. He could kiss him and press their bodies flush together but there was a closeness at that moment when Poe opened his mouth again that slipped past that limit. Everything else would just be extra.

“Some people…” Poe said. “They were convinced Luke killed him, but that doesn’t--”

“It sounds like a load of crap.”

“Yeah, exactly.” The hold on Finn’s wrist tightened. “Others think the only reason the Emperor fell was because Vader turned on him. Vader aligned himself with Luke in the end. Isn’t that guilt? Guilt doesn’t make me any different.”

“I don’t think that’s the best example for what you’re trying to prove,” he said. The First Order had painted Vader and the Emperor as their own kind of rebellion but were eerily silent on their fall; the older stormtroopers heading the individual corps swapped rumors between drills or while checking up on the kids sent to work sanitation, and it was more of the same, except--

( _“They say Luke Skywalker is Lord Vader’s son,” FN-0008 said, tone leaning heavily on a mocking note. “Skywalker was gonna die and his heart started beating again.”_ )

“Vader was steeped in the Dark Side for so long and still felt guilt. And shame,” Poe said, and his gaze fell down at his feet again. “Empathy.”

“Some might argue love too, even,” Finn said, and Poe’s eyes snapped back up to his. “But the Emperor didn’t. Kylo Ren didn’t.”

Someone--Rey or Jessika--was calling to them from where they had stayed but the words fell apart before they could make it across the distance. He didn’t look. Neither of them looked. Poe needed to understand before their feet could budge from that spot. If it came down to it, Finn would be ready to dig his own down to the ankles and grow roots if that would shade Poe from the scalding power he’d turned on himself.

“You said you were in love with me, before,” said Poe, his voice low.

In his peripheral vision, Finn saw Rey’s head bobbing through the grass towards them at a jog.

“I did say that, yeah.”

“Are you still? Even after…?” His face folded on itself.

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

It wasn’t rhetorical: his question fell forcefully off his tongue, a challenge. Why wouldn’t he still love him? He wanted Poe to outline the reasons so he could pluck each one from his wringing hands and crush it into dust between his palms, fragile as they were. _See_ , he could say, _see? This idea of you could never last._

And Poe merely stared at him like he’d just spoken anything but Basic.

“Hey.” It was Rey, barely out of breath. “Um. I don’t, uh--we’re headed back to the Falcon. We redid the list a little.”

Poe nodded, flashed her a grin. Trudged back, head down, through the path she’d cut to where Jessika and Bastian waited.

Finn watched and his heart sank into a puddle in his chest, only stopping when Rey reached for his hand to walk him back herself.

* * *

 

He was seated at a table. 

Not behind the controls of a TIE fighter, skirting inevitable death from an A-wing he’d almost  identified. Not standing at the base of the Force tree that had cursed him on Yavin 4 with the atmosphere there askew, burning black. And not standing in piles of ash while the forest burned on D’Qar--he hadn’t had that nightmare in a long time, not since before Jakku.

He sat at a table. Light-colored wood, sanded down meticulously to ward off splinters in wandering toddler thumbs. In a room even lighter, where the walls would creep back until they were no longer walls, just a backdrop an impossible distance to measure away.

On the other side of the table sat his mother.

She wasn’t a day older than the holos his father had kept from Endor, the celebration afterwards up in the trees with the Ewoks. Her hair curled in the same loops around her face as his and dipped down further, all the way to her mouth. The smile there didn’t reach her eyes, but it did pull them downwards with the weight of whatever she was trying to keep tucked out of sight.

“Oh, Poe.” Her smile split wider across her face but there were tears in her eyes now too. “You know I would never dream of hurting you.”

“When did I…”

When he stopped himself, she nodded. Tucked the stray wavy strands of hair behind her ear only for them to spring free again not long after.

“You’re Green Four,” he said. “You were shooting me down every night.”

“No,” she said. “No. I wasn’t. You convinced yourself that I would, though. Why?”

He’d expected her to be able to sense it. She hadn’t grown up near the tree like he had, but she had died by it. She was buried where its roots could reach. Saying it out loud, that wasn’t something he had prepared himself for, and he didn’t think he could bear to watch as she learned what her son had become.

“I…I got myself in a bit of a spot,” he said finally.

She said nothing, waiting for him to continue. And he could have sat where he was until the galaxy collapsed on itself at the end of time, silent and staring and trying to make it up to the hollow pieces in the years where she should have been.

“I miss you, Ma.” His eyes were hot and his nose stung and then, without much more warning, the rest of his face was wet with it. “There’s so much going on with the war--sometimes when I can’t sleep, I’ll stare up at the ceiling and think of all the questions I’d ask you about… I’m the commander of the whole squadron and I just want to know I’m doing it right.”

(He called his father as often as he could, sent holos when he couldn’t. Asked his advice when it felt appropriate--which wasn’t as often as Kes would have liked, and he would have liked it much less if he’d known Poe’s heartstrings were reaching past the living when he was troubled. That was something his mother could sense now, so the path laid untrodden.)

“I miss you, too.” It was barely a whisper. “You think you can’t miss people when you’re dead, but you do all the missing when you take a breath and just know it’s your last one. I never got to see you grow up. I never got to see you fly or fall in love.”

“I’m here now, though. I’m here now.”

“I know,” she nodded.

But it wasn’t the same. She didn’t need to say it.

It wasn’t the same, but seeing her here in his body full-grown and more scarred than what she had ever held in her arms--wounds twenty-odd years old were reopening beside fresh ones from the last few seconds whenever their eyes would meet across the gap.

He lost her once but had to mourn her twice.

The first: when he woke up that morning to find the house silent, her bed empty. When his father’s hand gripped his so hard leaving the funeral pyre Poe thought his bones would shatter.

The second: when his commanding officer at the Academy told him a story about her that he’d never heard and the entire sleepless night that followed, a single thought consumed him. That he would never know for himself who his mother really was. That she would never know who he would grow up to be.

The galaxy was robbing him of her all over again.

The galaxy was robbing him now, giving her to him like this. Letting them speak in a mimicry of real conversation. His chest froze, constricted his lungs until he was holding his breath waiting for the carpet to be yanked out from under his feet.

But he still had to know. “You fought so hard to make the New Republic… but would you have defected like I did? If you’d known?”

He’d acted so quickly when he did: sent a holo to his father a couple days after the General had pulled him aside but the AWOL notice had gotten there first. The notice and the panic, then the anger. ( _You’re a grown man, Poe, you don’t need to ask for permission--but at least tell me. I worry about you. I’m never not going to worry because you’re my son and you got more of Shara in you than anything, and I know how she was._ )

“In a heartbeat,” she said, like it should have been obvious. “Leftovers of the Empire back in the galaxy… we would’ve made a good team flying against them.”

“Yeah,” he whispered, and his eyes stung again. “We really would have, wouldn’t we?”

“Poe…” She reached across the table towards him with both hands and he scrambled to grab them--the wood stretched, the gap widened and his arms wouldn’t grow with it, and right when he touched the tips of her fingers--

********** 

The Falcon laid silent, rumbling toward another unknown through the night with Jessika and Rey at the helm.

Poe’s bed was damp from sweat, his whole shirt soaked through, and his hands--slick from the same source, but chilled too, the tips of his fingers starting to tingle towards numbness. As he sat up, his head throbbed and the line of pain shot straight through to the concentrated pit of _it_ in his chest. Fighting it was useless: he let the anger flare and fizzle back down to the level he’d learned to contained it to, and his empty canteen of water jumped to the floor.

An improvement, surely--when they’d landed on the last moon, his room looked as if it had survived an earthquake.

_Ma, I don’t want to be this._

The bunks on the ship weren’t equipped with anything close to a clock, so if it was too terrible of an hour to go knocking on Finn’s door there was no way for him to know. But he couldn’t be alone, and the thought of going to anyone else but him sent his insides all clammy and slipping through his grasp.

Finn had rescued him before, and how lucky Poe was to have him at his side whenever gravity lurched on his feet walking a tight line over the danger of the hour.

Finn loved him.

 _Loved_ him.

Was _in love_ with him.

It had been so tempting to shrug away Finn’s trust in him after bringing him back from the First Order again, but Poe could never quite pull that grip from his arm. The voice at the back of his head was starting to sound like his mother--or just carried the residuals from the dream--gentle and insistent that someone like Finn would know on sight what Poe feared he was on his way to becoming.

 _You trusted him more when you knew him less--_ a truthful statement that sounded odd in her voice, too blunt.

Though it was a misleading sort of truthful. Something in the voice blotted out its surroundings, picked it up to peer at it upside down or backwards. It was that he couldn’t accept _Finn’s_ trust, because trust made you open and whatever had dug its way into Poe under Kylo Ren’s watch could multiply and hop ship--and he’d be damned if he let someone like Finn fall. He couldn’t trust Finn not to take the fall just so Poe wouldn’t be alone. He couldn’t guarantee he still wouldn’t wish for it, somewhat, in a quiet whispering way deep under his chest, which was the entire reason Poe couldn’t trust himself, full stop.

Finn was in love with him, and it would only make him foolish.

And Poe--Poe didn’t know quite what this was he was feeling. He would come close to finding a word for it, trapping it in that still imperfect box only for it to disintegrate in his fingers. But if Finn was going to be foolish, he wouldn’t enable it.

The weakness was there, though, the same weakness that was wobbling his knees more and more as the days ticked on.

The same weakness that carried him out of his bunk and to the door of Finn’s, perching his hand an inch above the metal, ready to knock. And then knocking. Not slipping back into his bunk before Finn could rouse himself to answer the door.

“Poe?” The door cracked open, and Finn was rubbing at one of his eyes as he blinked at him. “What’s going on?”

“Had a… well. A dream woke me up,” he said. “I didn’t want to be alone.”

“Okay. Come on in.” He stepped aside and flicked on the light, motioning for Poe to join him sitting on the bed. The blankets were tangled in each other like he had been tossing and turning himself. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Their backs were up against the wall, legs a little ways past the knees dangling off the side. Finn’s foot tapped against his own, a gentle nudge of a reminder of the nights they’d spend in D’Qar like this when the insomnia and adrenaline were running too high to get the rest that the officers had ordered.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about my mother lately,” he said.

“Yeah?” Finn’s foot bumped his again, and he bumped him back. “What was she like?”

“I can’t do her justice,” he said. “I’ve… y’know, heard things from my father and other people but--” He sighed, and his hand reached across the small space to find Finn’s, large and warm and more than willing.

(He shouldn’t do this, he knew he shouldn’t--the trust issue was still there, central and growing larger all the while, and it felt right to hold his hand and feel their fingers lace together even though it wasn’t fair to Finn, who loved him, who was _in_ love with him, who ought to think about throwing an anchor down elsewhere.)

“I remember some things,” he continued. “Bits and pieces are still really vivid.”

“Tell me about those.”

Finn listened intently, asking the right questions to veer the path back towards any subject he didn’t think would be ideal for Poe to mull over for too long, like his mother and father over dinner disagreeing on which parts of the war story of the evening would be appropriate to share with their inquisitive six-year-old. Or when his father insisted that he go tell her goodnight and Poe had refused, not wanting to wake her, and the next morning--

“Did she ever take you up in her ship flying?” Finn said quickly. Evenly. As if he couldn’t tell there was a wet spot on his shoulder where Poe’s head had landed.

“All the time,” he said. “She would steer, of course, but she let me grab the controls under her hands as long as I didn’t try to take over. There was a lake on the other side of the jungle from our house, and it didn’t have the lizard crabs or armored eels like the swamps. She used to fly us over there so she could try to teach me how to swim.”

“Try?”

“The lake got deep. I was scared of drowning.”

“You? Scared of drowning?”

Finn’s voice had grown soft, much like his own had, and his head tilted until his cheek pressed into the messiest bits of Poe’s bedhead. A welcome, warm pressure focusing his attention there, and on their hands still clasped together, and their shoulders pressed into each other--Poe’s heart rattled against his ribs.

“Ma didn’t get it either. But it was something about the water…”

Finn didn’t ask what it was, specifically, and Poe didn’t know if he would have been able to tell him if had. The image still sat frozen in his mind’s eye: his mother’s messy ponytail, the water lapping at her waistline where she had waded in, her arms outstretched and waiting. His own toes were sinking into the silty shore with algae squeezing up between the gaps, and beyond where she stood, he couldn’t see anything past a certain depth, much less the bottom. Even the farthest reaches of space held faint spritzes of stars.

“She sounded like a wonderful woman,” said Finn after a few moments.

“She was.”

“She helped raise a wonderful son, too.”

“Sure,” Poe said, biting back a laugh. He was going to leave it at that, but he found himself saying, “Pa said to me all the time growing up, after she died, how much I was like her. There were the big things, like the piloting and… well, in his words, ‘recklessness fueled by even more reckless idealism’...” He had lost track of how many times his father had said that exact phrase when he was a teenager. “And then there were the habits. I don’t remember seeing her do any of these things, but Pa swears up and down she did. And I do them too. I mess with my eyebrows when I’m reading. I have the same tells when I try to lie. That sort of thing.” 

Finn’s mouth smiled against his hair. The hot flash at the center of Poe’s chest crackled and reached out past his ribs, spinning through the close air of the bunk toward something he couldn’t identify.

“I don’t know if half the things that make me who I am are even mine at all,” he murmured. “They might only be hers. And then that leaves--”

“I know where you’re going with that,” Finn said, “and I’m going to stop you there. Every part of you is you, okay? The weird way you blink when you tell Snap you have _no idea_ where his apple went, the even weirder way you hardly skipped a beat escaping with me on the Finalizer-- _you_.”

It was so easy for him to say that--him and Luke, caught in an echo chamber.

“I almost killed Kylo Ren,” he said suddenly. Waited for Finn to react, to pull away. But he didn’t move. “On Mustafar. He pitted me against a stormtrooper, and I didn’t mean to kick him over the edge, but--they’d been building up to it. Bringing out the Dark Side. They poured all the gas and dumped me on a planet with--just… fire everywhere. I wanted to kill him, Finn. Right in that moment, I wanted to kill him and I could have even enjoyed it if I’d succeeded.”

Still Finn did nothing--if anything, the grip on his hands grew tighter and his thumb rubbed the base of his wrist. The nothing was the worst part: he’d finally admitted it out loud and gravity hadn’t reversed, the galaxy was right side up, and Finn was only pressing closer to him and sighing into his hair.

“We’ve all killed people,” Finn said. “You, me, Rey… your mother too.”

“Not like this. Nothing like this.”

He squeezed his eyes shut until he saw the fuzzy clouds of color rushing up in the black; and then there was a hand on his far shoulder, the grip on his hand tighter still, and his cheek pressed against the hard pillow. His nose tucked into the hollow of Finn’s collarbone; the hammering of his heart slowed yet that stars-forsaken spot in his chest spread out to the whole of him, past his ankles and wrists, on to his nose too.

And despite the heat, Finn didn’t flinch. If anything, he pulled Poe closer.

“Get some sleep,” he murmured. “You’re going to be all right, Poe.”

********** 

Jessika let the Falcon hover in orbit around their latest destination while they all picked at their breakfasts the next morning. From the way she and Rey were slumping into their hands, they must not have gotten a lot of good sleep, either. Finn mirrored the two of them from across the holotable while Bastian, well-rested and oblivious, rattled on about his reasoning for ignoring instructions from base--Selvaris’ moons, he said, were resource deficient, while the planet itself would be able to sustain them with minimal supply runs and environmental impact.

“Plus,” he said far too cheerfully, “no native species that would be able to start a turf war.”

Jessika’s face scrunched up like she was about to stick him in the side with another barbed remark, but she must have thought better of it. That, or the ensuing yawn swallowed whatever she was going to say.

Truthfully, Poe felt just as exhausted as they looked; it stung his eyes every time he blinked and fell heavy in his stomach, dragging him inch by inch closer to falling back asleep. For every inch, however, his chest pulsed and sent him skittering back. Net zero, caught in limbo--save for the moments when Finn would nod off, knee twitching under the table and knocking into Poe’s. The skittering then was two inches. Three inches. Enough for a tight drop of adrenaline to crawl up the veins on the side of his neck.

He half-listened as Bastian went on about the planet’s other benefits, even toeing close to the specific tone and lilt of speech of a stereotypical Deep-Core salesperson just to drag their attention back from the brink of sleep. Selvaris was out of the way, off major trade routes, often forgotten on most standard-issue New Republic maps of the galaxy. It was closer to the Core than most of the analysts had wanted, but the nearby Reecee was an independent world and likely open for any necessary trade.

Which were all good, Poe could admit that. He could also admit he was more interested in going to back to bed than listening to this briefing get any more theatrical.

“What’s with the voice?” Jessika finally said. “Was the Resistance a backup plan for when drama school didn’t work out?”

“It’s not my fault you didn’t sleep last night and can’t pay attention,” he said. “I’m trying to help.”

“Maybe we should just go… do this already,” Finn sighed. “Get back to base before you two kill each other.”

It seemed like a popular enough idea--Bastian, Rey, and Jessika shuffled back to wherever they’d stashed their bags the night before to retrieve shoes and, in Rey’s case, a hairbrush to tame the interesting bedhead she’d sprouted. As soon as the last signs of them disappeared around the corner, Poe reached for Finn’s knee and latched onto it as firmly as he could without eliciting any suspicion.

“Hey,” said Finn.

“Thank you.”

Finn gently placed his hand over Poe’s. “For what?”

And he said it just like that, as if it were that easy. “Should I start at the beginning?”

Finn made like he was about to answer when Jessika’s voice called down the hall--“Are you two coming or what? Bastian’s about to land any second now.”

They maybe should have left the landing to someone who had flown the ship before; but while it was somewhat rocky, as Jessika pointed out, they also didn’t die in the fire that she had quite vocally expected.

When they at last were able to deboard the Falcon, all cutting commentary and mechanical issues aside, the sight of Selvaris stopped Poe dead in his tracks at the end of the ramp. The air was sticky humid, the kind that even smelled hot, wavy over the extension of the ship’s cockpit where broad tree leaves jutted into the sky against the weak constraints of a dozen different species of vines. Blossoms that had to be at least the size of his hand burst from the crowds of fronds at the edge of the jungle: neon pink with innumerable petals, deep indigo ombre into lavender, and a bright crimson sort balled tightly until the wind puffed at it weakly. The others had followed the line of trees as each one climbed higher into the than the next, but Poe was transfixed by the red flower, how the air could unfurl it until it laid open like an umbrella over the surrounding flora, its long yellow stamens stretching to unravel themselves. As soon as the wind abated, it wound itself right back to the tiny wad it was before.

“You ever seen anything like this?” Finn murmured.

The wind had picked up again and Rey was pointing the flower out to Jessika and Bastian; Poe took the moment to grab hold of Finn’s elbow, pull him closer. “I’m still going to take you to Yavin 4. I am. It’s…”

“It’s like this?”

“Yeah,” he grinned. “Yeah, it is. Not exactly the same, but--you’re going to love it.”

A low squawk from the forest pulled Finn’s attention for a moment--just a moment, falling right back to his eyes, and all Poe could imagine was the look on his face when he heard the whisper birds for the first time. The tips of his ears ran hot at the thought, then hotter still as Finn’s face softened into a smile that was all corners of his eyes.

“I think this is going to work,” said Bastian from the far edge of the clearing where they’d landed. “It’ll be rough going at first, but it’ll work.”

The trip back to D’Qar was silent, which maybe made it quick. Bastian volunteered to navigate back, agreeing to stay on the route Jessika painstakingly laid out for him, allowing the rest of them to crawl back into the bunks for a nap before the inevitable grilling the General was going to try to pass as a regular debriefing. But Poe knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep unless he was pressed back up against Finn’s chest, and he suspected that expressing as much would keep Finn from catching any bit of shuteye. He’d insisted he was fine and of course Finn rolled his eyes, but he didn’t fight it.

The main cabin was empty, then, save for himself on the inset bench stretched to take up as much of the length of it as he could. He wasn’t tall enough to do so--and he knew it--but the pull of his feet all the way up his calves was a point to focus on.

That, and the spot in his chest.

It hadn’t quieted enough for him to take advantage of the time to sleep, but the way it was coiling now rested far more familiarly with the other parts of himself there under his ribs, no longer scorching the outside of his lungs and throat. This: here in the Millennium Falcon, memories of his mother and the scent of Finn’s shirt against his skin up next to his fingertips, it was the calmest he’d felt since spotting Dantooine in the distance before the mission went to hell.

In his head, Poe tried to reach out and grasp it with both hands and hold it next to his chest, if he couldn’t pull it in completely. Let the heat fight against the stillness and lose, just this once.

He could sense it ebbing, pulling back, step by step. And he held fast to it. The image of his hands in his mind’s eye were starting to shake from the effort.

Off on the holotable, Rey had left behind one of the bands she used to keep her hair up.

Holding his arm to mimic the picture of it in his head, he reached out to it, curling his fingers in; a flash of dark orange hissed at the corners of his vision, echoes of Mustafar and Kylo Ren hovering high above the bridge by Poe’s hand--but it was only a flash, ebbing with the rest of the heat, and soon the hair band was floating into his palm.

He smiled at it, turned it over in his hand. And still such a small act, in keeping the well of everything else at bay, left him even more exhausted than before. The fire swelled up past his collarbone and into a rush behind his ears before settling back to its old levels. Writhing, too, under the frustration of how weak he still seemed to be.

At least now he could sleep.

In his dreams, the figure across the table was dark and shapeless. It did not speak.

* * *

 

Jessika had all but placed actual credits on the General drawing out the debriefing on choosing Selvaris for hours and hours, long into the night until any one of them was able to convince her that deviation from the list of options was the correct way to go. No one on the Falcon had exactly argued with her; even Bastian expected to encounter at least some resistance to the idea, and Rey could tell that all of them were hoping to avoid being sent back out to continue the search.

Possible imminent danger aside, Rey wouldn’t have minded as much as the others. Of course she was falling further behind on her lessons with Master Luke, but how could she be expected to pass up a chance to see everything Jakku would never have been able to offer?

However, less than five minutes into Bastian’s presentation of Selvaris to the officer corps, the General held up a hand to interrupt him.

“There’s room to move all our equipment and ships? Not stepping on the toes of other intelligent species?”

“Uh--um, yes ma’am,” Bastian said.

“And you lot agree with him?” She motioned to where the rest of them were seated off to the side, and they nodded. “Fine. Selvaris it is. We’re about two or three days from being completely ready to go, so hop to it. Good work.”

And that was that.

Bastian immediately disappeared into the throng of officers, and Rey turned to find Finn trailing out another door after Poe, calling after him. She felt a twinge of concern, but Jessika lightly elbowed at her side, mouth holding the start of a smirk.

“My bunk is a little bit of a disaster zone. Mind helping?”

That was probably code, wasn’t it? Insisting that she help out co-piloting the Falcon to Selvaris from Sernpidal had certainly been code--so much of it was taken care of by autopilot, and Rey couldn’t shake the question from her head until Jessika pulled her down on top of her in the pilot’s seat and kissed her until she was dizzy.

“Of course, yeah.”

When Jessika said “disaster zone,” it didn’t mean anything like Poe’s side of his shared bunk tended to be, but it still wasn’t the immaculate space Ematt tried to encourage them all to strive for. “I may have exaggerated a bit,” she said once the door was shut behind her. The room was a double, but the second bed was empty except for a pile of clothes on its way to or from the laundry.

“You, exaggerate?” Rey brought a hand to her face in feigned shock. “ _Never_.”

Jessika laughed, tilted her head back toward the ceiling and back down again, closing the distance between them with her slow steps. “You…” she said, resting her arms on Rey’s shoulders. “You’re a miracle if there ever was one.”

Rey’s heart leaped from her chest, taking most of her with it--she met Jessika halfway, kissing her already open-mouthed and hot, hands crawling up the back of her shirt. Jessika arched into the touch, pressed even closer into Rey until she found herself stumbling backwards into the wall of the bunk.

“You really want to do this?” Jessika asked, out of breath.

“Do you?”

“Yes--” She cut herself off with a sharp gasp, a stifled groan as one of Rey’s hands dipped down to the skin of her hip. “There’s no pressure--”

“Didn’t think there was, honestly.” Rey went to try to kiss her again but was met with a faceful of fabric as Jessika stripped off her shirt. “ _Oh_.”

It fell to a heap at their feet; Jessika half-heartedly kicked it out of the way while she reached up her back, arms bent at odd angles. All Rey could do was stare. Her bra was snug against her chest and it was more of any human woman she had ever seen before--was she supposed to help her? Was there something else she should have been doing with her hands, her mouth? Maybe this was her own cue to start stripping, because there she was, fully clothed as Jessika continued to fight with her bra clasp and stepped out of her socks.

She had to do something, at least, yanking off her own top and deftly sliding out of the rest of the layers underneath until she was left with bare skin--in front of another person, no less, again for the first time, and the heat that rose all the way up her face when Jessika noticed, eyes crawling all over her with the furthest thing from embarrassment.

Rey stepped forward--were her hands shaking?--and reached her arms around Jessika’s back to undo the clasp. It fell to the floor far more silently than it should have since wasn’t this significant in some way? Firsts so often were, and this was so many twisted up in one thick bundle.

Jessika wasted no time in pressing back up against her again, the heat of their bare chests shooting sparks down Rey’s neck all the way to the base of her spine; and while needy hands traced deep trails across the whole expanse of her, Jessika kissed her slowly, softly. There was a whine growing low in her chest, crawling into a sigh as she felt teeth drag along her lower lip.

“What do you want?” Jessika’s voice dipped right into the shell of her ear, hot.

“You.”

“Gotta be more specific,” she laughed.

“I…” It certainly wasn’t helping that Jessika had latched her lips to the underside of Rey’s jaw, tongue darting out to match her quickening pulse. “I like your hands on me.”

“Yeah?” The curve of Jessika’s grin swelled along the line of the vein in her neck and Rey’s arms tightened vice-like against her back. “What else?”

“And your mouth--ah,” she gasped.

Jessika put just enough space between them to fit her hands, cupping her breasts then sliding lower, tucking her fingers along the waistband of her shorts. Curling them, tugging there with a gentle step back away from the wall, around the scattered piles of clutter and to the edge of her bed.

“I have some ideas then.”

“Great,” Rey whispered. Her hands swept back up to Jessika’s face as she was guided down--not gracefully by any means, halfway falling into each other, stumbling over limbs, and laughing, finding the purchase of each other’s lips again. “Because I really don’t know anything about this.”

Jessika’s grin flashed, wicked, leaving one last deep kiss before trailing a hot line down her chest, pausing to mouth up her breasts until Rey was arching her back into it, gasping. She glanced down, caught Jessika’s eye; a light sparked there when she saw the flush in Rey’s cheeks, something like reassurance that this was still okay, before turning her attention back to her stomach.

And of course this was okay-- _okay_ , stars, the waves surging all through the layers of her skin was beyond anything she had ever felt and it still wasn’t enough, but it was getting there, with Jessika’s tongue pressing at the line of her shorts, finally pulling them down.

Their eyes met again over the plain of her stomach, Jessika’s grin turned waiting and hesitant as she tucked her head lower and brushed a burning kiss to the inside of her thigh, then higher, and--

 _Oh_ … _?_

“Ah--what are you doing?” she gasped.

Jessika’s head popped up, mouth gaping and eyebrows quickly closing the distance to her hairline. “What’s wrong?”

“You… um,” she said slowly. The words weren’t coming easily--though they needed to if she were going to assuage the growing distress on Jessika’s face. “Why was your tongue--”

“I don’t have to go down on you if that’s too much,” she said. “Really. I’m sorry, I should’ve--”

“Wait, it’s a thing?” Her heart was still beating as fast as a land cruiser, rattling, and she thought back on the brief moment when Jessika had first pressed the tip of her tongue between her legs, the shock of it, the wave that followed. The thump of her heart had to have been audible outside her chest the way it sped up all eager.

“Um.” Jessika crawled back up the bed to lay beside her, still half clothed but beautiful, focused on Rey’s face wholly. “It is. But like I said, we don’t have to--”

“I _want_ you to,” Rey murmured, easing forward to kiss her, to lay her hands across her chest and down her stomach, to reach around to her ass. “I didn’t know but now I do.” When she pulled back, Jessika’s eyes were blown wide and her breathing ragged. “Show me.”

“How about one step at a time?” The smirk was back, keeping Rey’s eyes glued to it, the way her lips pulled and shone in the dull light of the bunk, and when she felt fingers tread the path her tongue had blazed, the sensation roared through her whole body and maybe she was holding on too tightly with her arms wrapped around Jessika’s shoulders but she couldn’t have unglued herself if she had even wanted to.

“I wanted to make this so good for you,” Jessika said in her ear, and after all the debacle Rey wanted to tell her _yes, stars, it’s amazing, please_ \--but it wrenched forth from her throat in a moan. “Yeah, that’s it, that’s it…”

Jessika’s hand bent, crooked at the right angle and Rey felt her legs twitch as she cried out, the bright hot surges rolling up to her shoulders then back down to the tips of her toes--Jessika pressed kissed to her neck as she came down from it, and only then did she realize she was panting her name.

“Jess--”

“Right here,” and the grin was in her voice, edging to a laugh.

“Wow.” Then the thought hit her--“What about, uh. You?”

“One step at a time, like I said,” she whispered into her ear, and it sent shivers down Rey’s spine.

Her foot pushed up against a bundle of clothes wrapped up in the comforter at the end of the bed--a reminder. The packing, however good of an excuse it was to step away, still remained, their time on D’Qar ticking away and down to the nub of it. But the packing could wait, and there would always be more chances to pack, here or elsewhere. D’Qar could hold them here like this only once.

********** 

The cafeteria was bustling at dinner that night--without regular drill runs, scouting missions, or active situations to monitor, the shift schedule that had kept the space from overcrowding had completely collapsed, and somehow everyone had the same bright idea to grab a meal at the same hour. By the time Rey and Jessika had pulled themselves together and thrown at least some of the mess in boxes, most tables were pushed to the limit of seats they could fit and some unlucky stragglers were left sitting along the walls, balancing trays on their laps.

Rey immediately spotted Finn and Poe at one of the smaller tables near the back corner, the one Snap had said had a wobbly leg and always made someone spill their caf in the morning. Their heads were ducked low over their food which, even at a distance, had clearly only been picked at. But two empty chairs just as off-balance laid at either side of them, and Jessika had already muttered something about there being no way in hell she was going to be sitting on the floor with the mechanics.

“Please tell me they’ve run out of spice loaf,” Jessika groaned as she plopped into the chair, the screws on the legs squeaking a complaint. “Y’know, I’m hoping that something about Selvaris magically keeps them from being able to cook that stars-forsaken garbage.”

“Not sure,” Finn shrugged. “They said they had to go back to the kitchens to bring out another batch of stuff, but they didn’t say if--”

“Well, I’ll go check at least.” She sighed, squeezing Poe’s shoulder as she passed to maneuver her way through the throng.

Rey thought about following after her to secure a place in line if need be, but she was suddenly aware of Finn and Poe eyeing her, questioning without _actually_ questioning anything out loud, and the weight of all they weren’t saying kept her in the seat. “If you two weren’t hungry, why’d you get a tray?” Her initial observation across the room had been right--the spice loaf, greens, and mashed yams all barely had a couple bites missing, and they’d long congealed to room temperature.

But they kept staring. Finn in particular kept jabbing his fork into the yams, an odd curve forming across his face that would quickly sink back to a barely-there hint.

“Did you get much of Jessika’s room packed?” he finally said.

“I…” She glanced between them. Something was off. “We got a fair amount in. She’s got a lot of things and they’re not organized.”

He nodded and turned back to the yams, picking out a chunk on the tips of the fork’s tines only to refold it into the rest of the mound. The thought occurred to Rey that he might not have been convinced, though there was no way for anyone else to have known what she and Jessika had spent the majority of that time doing. (Unless, of course, she had been too loud--she hadn’t noticed during her brief time on D’Qar how well sound traveled between the rooms, but what if--)

Poe had started to squint at that point, leaning toward their shared corner of the table. “Are you and her sleeping together?” he whispered.

“What? You--you two know we had to share a bunk that night on the Falcon.”

His expression didn’t change; if anything, it only worsened as he looked to Finn in something close to a plea for help.

“What’re you staring at me like that for?” Finn frowned.

“I’m…” Poe sighed. “I’m not going to say it.”

“Well, that’s not exactly going to help any of us, is it?” he said.

Poe cleared his throat and cast a brief glance over his shoulder. “Rey,” he said. “As you know… the Force connects people.”

“Right,” she said.

“Especially when they’re both sensitive to it.”

“Yes.” She nodded, tried to encourage him to get to the point already because at this rate the entire base would be well on their way to Selvaris by the time he finished.

“And they can sometimes, if they’re friends or whatever, y’know… sense what they’re feeling…” His voice, already at a low whisper, trailed off into nothing--as if said point of this whole segue was actually found at this short of a distance.

“Wait a second,” Finn said, holding up a hand. “So you’re saying ‘sleeping together’ means ‘having sex’?”

Poe sighed “ _yes_ ” in relief right as Rey managed to splutter out the start of a series of questions, all elbowing their way out of her mouth and cutting each other off in the process. How could he _possibly_ have known that she and Jessika had gotten intimate if--

The answer was right in front of her, from his own words.

 _The Force_.

She and Poe stared at each other, both of their faces blank with the horror of embarrassment and the stinging heat in their cheeks that followed. (And both trying to ignore Finn’s muttering to himself about how the First Order was awful but at least they were more direct when they talked about this sort of thing.)

“For what it’s worth,” Poe said as he broke eye contact and focused back on his food, “once I realized what was happening, I managed to block it off. Mostly. I’m still new at this. But I’m happy if you’re happy and, uh--” Relief fell upon her shoulders when he shut himself up and pressed a too-large chunk of spice loaf into his mouth.

How horrendously mortifying. At this rate, she almost didn’t want Jessika to return from the food line knowing that they _knew_ , but the other part of her, the voice of some semblance of reason, needed her back to steer the conversation away from whatever this was and distract her from questioning how Finn picked up on what Poe was hinting at so quickly. That was its own issue, and she was rapidly needing bigger hands to carry this one already.

A tray clattered in front of her, and she looked up to find Jessika settling back into her seat with her own, eyeing Poe and his bulging cheek. “I thought you hated spice loaf.”

He shrugged and returned to poking his greens into what Rey now recognized as a crude rendition of the Rebel Alliance emblem.

“I missed something, didn’t I?”

“Nah,” Finn said. “But um, nice going you two.”

Jessika glanced at Rey across the table before squinting back at him. “For what?”

“They know, Jess,” Rey said. There wasn’t any need to draw this out and make it any more painful than it already was--and for half a second she thought it was going to go down that road anyway until the revelation broke across Jessika’s face, shifting into an omen for a fight. “But no one said anything. Poe, uh… he felt it with the Force,” she whispered.

Snorting, Jessika took a bite of her yams. “Yeah right, that’s the worst lie I’ve ever heard. Poe isn’t Force-sensitive.”

But no one else was laughing, Poe especially, and Rey’s stomach sank all the way past her knees--it hadn’t occurred to her that Jessika didn’t know, and if she didn’t, there was probably good reason why he hadn’t told her.

Poe swallowed the last bit of the spice loaf he had in his mouth and made like he was about to break off another large chunk to disqualify him from being the one to say it. But the fork pushed against the top of it, the tines barely breaking the surface, before he set it back down, eyeing the corners of the tables or the light lines of scars along the back of his hands.

With the way Jessika was staring now at Poe, mirth long gone from her expression, Rey made as many mental notes as possible to ask Master Luke if there was a way to use the Force to step backwards in time and close a hand over her own mouth before she needed to put her foot there instead. (It was a useless question--that much was obvious, because if the Force let its users change the past, so much of the history of the galaxy would not be the way it was. Seeing the General in the days after Starkiller was enough proof of that.)

“When did this happen and why didn’t you tell me?” Jessika hissed.

“I didn’t tell anyone, Jess--”

“Are Rey and Finn not anyone?”

Poe held up his hands, and once Jessika sat back in her seat with her arms crossed, he managed to collect himself enough to sort through his thoughts. His thumb was pressed against the center of his breastbone as if it were holding back a flood of buzzing anxiety that she was starting to sense herself in the web between them. On the other side of her, Finn’s leg began to jiggle against the table.

“I told Finn. Luke knew. Rey was--”

“An accident,” she finished, and she hoped that he could sense the waves of regret rolling off her even if her throat was sticking on the words.

“It happened when I got taken,” said Poe, like he was talking to his yams. “It didn’t go well. I’m not--you remember how you found me on the star destroyer.”

“You still could’ve told me,” Jessika muttered, sucking down a gulp of water from her canteen.

“It wasn’t you, though. It wasn’t anything with you.”

Aching, Rey’s heart fell down to join her stomach as Jessika grabbed her portion of spice loaf in a napkin and got back up with her tray. “I have to go check and see if they’re done fixing my X-wing, anyway.” She squeezed Rey’s shoulder when she walked pasted, but Rey could only stare at Poe and the thin line of his mouth, tense.

“I’m sorry,” she finally said, and he tried to wave it away. “No, I _am_. I shouldn’t have been the one to say anything.”

Finn glanced between them and excused himself, mentioning something about he was going to check on Jessika, but his muttering faded away into nothing intelligible by the time he gave them a last look over his shoulder.

And then they were alone.

“You don’t have to be sorry,” said Poe. “I never did give you an actual explanation after…”

“Drem?”

“Yeah,” he said. He went back to picking at the food on his tray, mashing up the shape he’d so painstakingly made in the vegetables into a blob again. “And I should have. I talked to him this morning, made things right. But I owed you one, too.”

And maybe an explanation would have helped matters, but Poe using the Dark Side--it hadn’t stuck with her like she’d expected it to. The instance she saw was so out of place from what she knew about Poe, what she’d heard from Finn and seen for herself, that she hadn’t even thought to carry the concern she’d felt in that moment any further. If anything, her connection to the Force had only reassured her that Poe had nothing but pure intentions at the core of him, even now when something troubled him so dearly.

“Look,” he said again, this time meeting her eye. “I know Jessika likes to keep her relationships private, and I didn’t mean to find out that way, but I’m--I’m honestly overjoyed for the both of you. You two deserve this after… well.” He sighed. “I want to fix things.”

Tray in hand, he stood up and motioned for her to follow, leading them through the hallways of the base until the crowds thinned to nothing at the corner between Besh and Cresh Wings. There he slid down the wall to the floor, casting the tray off a few inches beside him, and Rey did the same--except her appetite was growling against the inside of her ribs, her food hadn’t cooled, and she didn’t have the same aversion to spice loaf the rest of them had developed. Chewing on a corner piece, she watched Poe’s eyes fall shut in another deep sigh.

“If you’re worried about Jess, I don’t think that needs fixing,” she said.

“No, I know that. If she was upset with me, the whole base would know,” he said with a half-laugh.

“Then what things were you talking about?”

His hand came to rest on his chest, fingers fully splayed, then curling back together to trace a vertical line at the center between his ribs where his thumb always worried. “There’s not much in the galaxy we have any control over. Except yourself. You have control over that.”

His eyes had halfway glazed over as he stared at the opposite wall, watching something in his head far from D’Qar and the Ileenium System. She could almost see it herself, from her own angle, how it looked like the sandstorms that would rip around Niima Outpost in the windy season and blow a day of scavenging off the calendar, spreading a thin pile of portions even thinner.

“Then Ren did what he did, and I did what _I_ did. And now I don’t. I don’t have that control anymore,” he murmured. “I feel like I have to fight to keep myself in check, and what you saw with Drem--I lost that fight.”

“You had a bad day,” she said. A light way of putting it, she knew. But it helped. The simplistic perspective helped, in a gentle way--Unkar Plutt, in his one offering of something like kindness, had given her the same explanation, albeit gruffly, the first week she scavenged on her own. One quarter portion for the little she’d dug up, and he’d called it a bad day, to try again tomorrow on a different part of the felled star destroyer along that ridge. And she’d gotten better.

“It doesn’t define you,” she said a little bit firmer.

“But it helps.” His hands crawled up his face, pressing into his eyes. “And I don’t want this connection with the Force. I think--when I was really young, _really_ young, I fantasized about being a Jedi. It was all fairy tales then. And now it’s real and complicated, and Luke wanted me to train with you two--”

“So why don’t you?”

“Because I don’t want to get stronger--I want it to go _away!_ ” His hands stayed by his face, but the tray he’d taken from the cafeteria skidded a few feet down the hall, the last bits of his spice loaf tumbling off the plate. “What if…” he whispered. “What if I studied with you and that only meant this got harder to control?”

“But what if it got easier?”

At that, his face split into a laugh--the shape of it without the sound or even the emotion that was expected to be behind it, the kind of laugh that crawled its way out of the throat when nothing else had the energy to make the climb. But the laugh always did, even in the face of the terrible shadow Poe had been watching from the corner of his eye this whole time.

“It’s risky,” he sighed. The smile had faded to something quieter but still present.

“From what I hear, that’s the sort of thing you’re supposed to like.” The endless stream of _you’ll be okay_ and _don’t worry_ always turned to white noise if pushed long enough, that much she knew. So push something else, tug at another thread glowing at the edge of him. “You can hope for your best case scenario all you want but it doesn’t make it any more unlikely,” she said. “Eventually you’re going to have to do something other than wait. You’re going to have to live, somehow.”

The low, hot buzz she had learned to sense from him--his own well of connection with the Force--slipped towards her, weaving a loose loop around her elbow and around her shoulder until it could rest along the dip of her collarbone, turning to hide a face it knew it didn’t have. A small burst of shame was soon overshadowed by a thousand lighter things, and the center of him was no longer a buzz or a hum in that moment but something clearer that had no equivalent that she had ever come across in the galaxy.

If she had to pick a word, though, her finger would have landed on _peaceful_ , even if it lasted only a fraction of a second.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll come to your sessions at least until we leave D’Qar. No promises after that.”

* * *

 

Finn had imagined after the two recent jaunts through the galaxy that he could read Jessika’s moods better than he had before--“before” usually consisted of a method where unless he was not alone and she was visibly happy about something, he tended to steer clear. But things had changed, hadn’t they?

They had, but this wasn’t part of it. He’d arrived breathless at her bunk door to explain away the issue with Poe, apologize on both of their behalfs, only to find her throwing her possessions haphazardly in a couple boxes from her bed with one hand and holding a half-eaten spice loaf in the other.

“What?” she said when she saw him standing in the doorway. “I’m not actually mad at Poe. I just didn’t want to sit there and have that godsawful conversation about what he _felt_ , and me leaving would mean you would close to the subject with Rey, too.”

He watched as a wad of socks landed dead center in the box on the other side of the room. “I’m surprised they haven’t recruited you for grav-ball with that aim.”

“Best-kept secret on base,” she said lightly. Another glance his way, coupled with a pointed raise of her eyebrows, was enough of a hint and at more than one thing.

Whether or not she wanted company at the moment was not something he was willing to take bets on, nor was he feeling comfortable enough to ask; instead he nodded and backed out to the hallway, closing the door behind him.

He let himself take the return to the cafeteria slowly, each of his steps plodding through his latest revelation he’d needed to adjust to--and it wasn’t so much as a new one as it was an addition. Inside or outside the First Order, love for another person had more reasons to be kept secret than not. How long would it have taken Jessika to tell Poe about her and Rey if his connection with the Force hadn’t picked it up? It still wasn’t something he completely understood about life as a regular person, how the galaxy could be wrapped up in so much sadness and grief and pain and the little bits of light they could generate for themselves, among themselves, were shrouded. Tucked away even deeper.

Fear--he suspected it was fear, the motivation behind the secrecy among his fellow stormtroopers. If Captain Phasma found out you were having sex-- _sleeping together_ , or whatever they called it--then you both were transferred to a new corps, given a new designation just to rub it in. Reeducated, of course. FN-7749 had come from a star destroyer on the other side of the galaxy, a corps that started with V or G. Finn couldn’t remember what she’d told them, only that she was quiet and that one week after she arrived she stopped showing up at morning drills.

If Captain Phasma caught wind that you were in love, that was the fodder of myth. The older members of the corps all said they knew someone who had been discovered, either holding hands under the desk at lessons or leaving notes around bunks and work assignments. They said the retribution had been tremendous in scope, how the leadership had made examples of them, taken the ship to a far-off, barely hospitable planet so one of the offending pair could watch as the other was left behind. The tale was consistent enough that Finn suspected there was at least a grain of truth to it.

He couldn’t see the General doing anything of the sort to her crew. Hadn’t she fallen in love in the era of the Rebel Alliance? The fear he could still sense, but the arbiter of it eluded him.

Once he’d made it back to the cafeteria, the question for Poe fully formed in his head, the table in the back corner was empty except for the tray where he had been sitting.

“If you’re looking for Poe and Rey, they headed down that hall there.” Snap was seated at the table right next to him and he hadn’t even noticed, the one person in his group with any bit of life to him. Beside him, Karé was slumped against her arm and snoring while Iolo and Nien Nunb switched between staring at their food and the ceiling. “Not sure where, though,” he sighed, offering a warm grin.

“Thanks, man.”

He followed where Snap had pointed even though he knew that the tip was useless given the size of the building--aside from his one attempt at following Skywalker to Poe’s med bay, he had never come close to an entire third of it, and even in Aurek and Besh Wings there were a number of nooks and crannies where they could have been.

The anxiety crawling over his skin was new, though, this need not to be alone, all while his memories of the rare and coveted moments of solitude away from the sea of white armor still sat so fresh in his head. But so much had gone wrong and so much was changing, aftershocks after that first jolt of defection, that maybe he just needed some familiar faces while they rode it out.

(And Poe, too, was still struggling--)

“Finn!”

He found his nose suddenly an inch away from Skywalker’s grizzled gray beard, two hands latching onto his shoulder to force an acceptable amount of distance between them.

“Oh--um, I’m sorry, wasn’t really paying attention to where I was going,” he said quickly.

“Well, where _were_ you going before you stopped paying attention?” The center of his beard curved slightly, which Finn guessed meant he was smiling or something close to it because Skywalker was a legend and legends didn’t smile or find things amusing. Legends sat in history, stoic, where no one could round a corner and accidentally walk right into them.

“I was looking for Poe and Rey--”

“Luckily for you, they should be right behind me.”

Finn leaned to the side to peer around him and found the corridor empty of other people as well as any other signs of them. He straightened back up and squinted at him, hoping for an explanation that he suspected he wouldn’t get--Skywalker had spent years and years alone on that planet, enough to strain the most steady of minds. The General of course trusted him with her life and more, but Finn had to wonder if parts of him had sprung loose into a frizzier shape than was expected of a Jedi.

“Or… or not,” Skywalker said. “They’re headed to the gym. I did tell Rey that I spend a lot of time there…” He grew quieter until he was muttering to no one but himself, motioning with his gleaming metal hand to come with him as he set off down Besh Wing. “Poe told you he’s Force sensitive?”

“How did you--”

“You have a specific sense of worry about him,” he said. “Your worry isn’t from not knowing what’s wrong--it’s from knowing exactly what’s wrong but still feeling helpless to do anything.”

Finn gaped at him for half a moment before shrugging into a nod. If Skywalker was able to pinpoint that much, then he should have easily been able to tease out what was fueling the worry; still, he gave no indication that he sensed Finn’s affections aside from a tight twitch in his beard where the corner of his mouth would have been.

“It’s just a feeling, though. You aren’t helpless at all. Far from it.”

“What makes you say that?”

But he didn’t answer, at least not the question he asked.

“The gravity here is much better suited for Force training than Ach-To,” said Skywalker. “For a planet not much larger than this one, it managed to pull everything down with the force of somewhere a lot more inhospitable. You don’t realize how badly your bones ache from it.”

Finn hoped he wasn’t staring--or, he hoped that he wasn’t staring with any particular expression that would give away the question marks flying through his head. One of them knocked into the memory of when he first met Rey, when she confessed she thought Skywalker was a myth, and maybe she wasn’t all wrong. The man beside him resembled little of the portrayals he had grown up seeing within the First Order’s educational system, and he doubted whether the rest of the galaxy had dedicated more of itself to the truth.

Luke Skywalker was just a man. An important man, but not so impossibly tall that he was immune to the erosive pushes and pulls of the passing years.

“I did hear your question, Finn,” he said. “Me telling you wouldn’t make any difference. You’ll find out for yourself soon enough.”

A couple of Kalonia’s medical droids rounded the corner in front of them laden with old boxes of supplies, forcing them to hop out of the way. Skywalker’s metal hand groaned as it latched onto his jacket to keep him from slamming into the wall.

“That’s cryptic,” he said, brushing himself off. By the time he looked back up, Skywalker was already halfway down the hall. “How long were you by yourself on Ach-To anyway?”

“What, you think I’m a little off?”

“Um--that wasn’t--”

“It’s a fair question. And maybe I am. I think I fared a little better than some, though.” He pushed through a set of doors that sectioned off Besh Wing from the hangars, a small grin crawling up his beard as soft garbled voices drifted down the hall. “You should’ve seen who trained _me_.”

It was evident when they got to the gym that the room had been one of the first to get packed up--the missing sparring mats left clear lines between the grimy exposed concrete and the bits it had shielded from the soles of boots and feet, the water cooler stand had been tipped over with nothing left to hold, and the echoes sang louder in the extra space they’d been given. At the center of it all sat Rey and Poe, facing each other with their legs crossed.

“He’s going to make you meditate at a lot at first,” said Rey.

“I--well. I figured.”

“No, really. A _lot_. You’re going to get sick of it--”

“But you would admit it helped you down the road?” Skywalker called, and the emptiness around them projected his voice like he had shouted.

“Master Luke!” Rey sprung up to her feet and made like she was about to come towards them but decided against it, toes stuttering against the floor. “I was about to come find you but--”

Skywalker held up his hand. “I know. Poe wants to train with us, right?”

Finn looked over to where Poe was still sitting--he had been carefully staring at Skywalker’s feet but turned back to his own hands in his lap when he heard his name, his brow settling into a deep crease. His fingers knotted together, and Finn wanted nothing more than to untangle them.

“Not completely,” Poe said quietly. “I don’t… I don’t want to use a lightsaber or anything, but I want to control this.”

Skywalker nodded, and Poe’s grin back at him was only a thin straight line. They would start the next morning, and would Finn join them? The three of them stared expectantly as they waited for him to answer.

“I’m not…” he started, wavering.

“Meditation helps everyone,” Skywalker said. “And you and Poe seem to have a bond… it could help him.”

He agreed with hardly a second thought, and that night as Poe fell asleep within minutes, he found himself staring at the blank black of the ceiling, wondering about Selvaris, the first nights there when the base would be nothing but a collection of tents and a vision. Poe’s breathing was calm, rhythmic, and he counted it as best he could to will himself to sleep but something restless had gotten into his blood. It circled around the worry that Skywalker had pointed out without ever touching it and he wondered if Poe’s sleep was as peaceful as it seemed from the outside, if that was what his intuition was telling him.

Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t.

He wanted to guard against the hurt all the same, pretend that if he could wrap Poe into him like he had on the Falcon that night that at least some parts of these demons could be kept at bay. He’d seen it some between Skywalker and the General, the stress lines on their faces in the situation room that would ease with a hand against a shoulder. A look across the room. Whether they got nightmares or were plagued by crippling self-doubt when no one could see them, that was something Finn didn’t know. Could never know, because that was wasn’t something to be open about when leading the second rebellion in one’s life.

So he started counting Poe’s breaths where he left off, somewhere around a hundred, and then he was yanking his eyes open as Poe knelt beside him, tapping his arm.

“Sorry for waking you up--”

“No, no…” Finn pushed himself up so that he was sitting and rubbed the blurry remnants of sleep from his eyes. “What’s going on? Are you all right?”

“I, um.” Poe sat back on his heels and ran a hand through his bedhead, and if it was an attempt to tame the cowlicks that had sprouted, it was in vain. The hair sprung back up at its odd angles like someone had glued it that way. “I can’t fall back asleep. Can I, uh…” He said it all so quickly that Finn nearly missed it, but the hesitant point at the rumpled sheets was a sign enough of what he was asking.

The bed was larger than the one on the Falcon but not by much, not enough to matter. He crawled in beside him as he scooted over, their hips touching, and Finn spied Poe’s eyes shift to him and fall. A grim smile caught them before they fell too far, before the descent glazed them over and pressed their sights past the physical and into something empty that would try to swallow him whole.

“Nightmare?” Finn asked.

“Surprisingly, no.”

Finn’s chest contracted as he struggled to keep his reaction to a nod and the urge to brush Poe’s hair out of his eyes and kiss along his eyebrow rose up maddeningly. “That’s good at least.”

“Yeah. Still can’t sleep, though.”

They shifted down, and Poe ended up with his back to Finn’s chest, his hands latched across Finn’s arm that was draped over his side. The nape of his neck was right at Finn’s nose, and he could pick up an even mix of sweat and soap--his breath lingered there, hot on Poe’s skin. He wanted to kiss it, kiss every part of him and wring out the sounds FN-5518 pulled from him the couple times they had stolen away--because it was more than just the words he laid at his feet and more than the grip of hands on bare, sensitive skin. A middle road, braiding the two together into something stronger.

“Finn?”

“Hm?”

Poe rolled over to face him, the uncertainty along his brow evident even in the dark. “Is this okay?”

“Of course it’s okay,” he said, but his mouth formed around the question anyway, silent. And Poe could see it.

“I don’t have to sleep here if it’s going to be--if it’s uncomfortable for you,” he said. “If I’m taking advantage of… the circumstances, you gotta--”

His voice cut itself off like it had been chopped in half and Finn reached around to cradle Poe’s head into his chest. “You’re not. I’m fine, _you’re_ fine.”

Poe sighed a shuddering breath into his shirt, the stuttering humidity of it burrowing straight into his heart as he felt his arms crawl around to his back, hold on to his shoulders. Knees bumped together, toes touched and pressed into the close spaces between them, and within minutes the rise and fall of Poe’s chest against his own was rolling and even.

When Finn dreamt that night, his visions were crested with golden wings and a low throaty song over the percussion of rustling leaves. Blips of images, and then there was impatient banging against the door to the bunk, Rey’s voice going on about how they’d overslept.

They hopped into their shoes as they ran down the hall after her, fighting the current of their peers heading to the airfield and storage units in the opposite direction. Jessika was among them, and she offered a short but warm punch to the arm for each of them, even Rey; but there her fingers lingered a half second longer.

Skywalker was waiting for them at the center of the gym, crossed-legged and back straight, lightly tapping the floor on either side of him. “Come sit,” he said, and once they were, Finn noticed Rey mouthing along to his speech like she had heard it a thousand times before. “Before you can use the Force, you have to know it. You have to _understand_ it.”

Finn was only half listening. The Force talk was meant for Rey and Poe--mostly Poe--and meditation was easy enough. Sit still, clear your mind. Sense the push and the pull of all things, the straining net that held the universe together, the specific knots tying in their galaxy--that was the harder bit. When Finn cleared his mind it was never completely empty, conjuring up instead a soft treeline jutting up into a white-gray sky. The ground was dry under his feet there and it crunched as he shifted his weight. And there was a hum too, light, tracing the outline of his shoes: a ship taking off behind him, maybe, or a speeder in the surrounding woods. The hum ran up to his ankles, then his shins and knees all the way up his body to the crown of his skull.

But Poe coughed, and his feet were yanked back to the folds of his knees and the hard floor digging into his ankles.

“You have to focus, Poe,” Skywalker said.

“No disrespect, but it got hard to focus when I swallowed down the wrong way.”

“Poe.”

“I did better than--”

Finn felt him stop himself, pause, step over the barrier he’d run up against.

“I did better than before,” Poe said finally, quietly, and Skywalker nodded to himself.

They settled back into rhythm after a moment--Finn snuck a glance over at Rey to mimic her position, the set of her back. During the whole disruption, she hadn’t moved; under her eyelids, there hadn’t even been a sign that her eyes had twitched. 

Finn tried to return to where his mind had taken him before, but something had slipped. The dirt crunched beneath him in the same way, lighter than the shifting of gravel; the trees rooted in it rose up and thrust their branches in the opposite direction that he remembered, losing themselves against the navy backdrop of the night sky, the smaller twigs at the end curving like claws--

He blinked and the old scene returned in a rush of noise, the deep songs of the winged animal joining with another in a tight harmony. Far off against the horizon of the treeline rested a curved crest of clouds tinged with a blue-gray that had signaled snowstorms on Starkiller. The warmth here would keep it to rain--if it ever arrived.

He waited for it, a stationary swab of white marring the uniformity of everything else above, and it never came.

The ration bars the kitchen passed out for lunch were a familiar comfort: easier to chew and swallow than their counterparts in the Order, but with enough of a teasing hint of flavor that he could almost identify which meal rotation it would have been. The fourth maybe, with the odd tangy aftertaste that stuck to the inside of his mouth long into the afternoon when he followed Poe back to their bunk to start throwing his things in the boxes left outside the door.

Poe was hardly looking at anything before packing it, questionably-dirty socks crowded into corners beside doodles and outdated holopads with Rebel Alliance markings on the side, half-empty bags of snack mix rolled up in a jacket that couldn’t have possibly fit him anymore. Finn tried to sort things: strategy notes on the pillow, clumsy doodles of BB-8 and X-wing engines at the foot, clean clothes at least away from the dirty ones--but Poe would waltz over and sigh, give him this _look_. Like Finn was a puzzle he thought he’d solved only to find the completed image positing an impossible riddle.

And then he would scoop up as much as he could carry in an armful, shrugging everything mixed together into the box at hand. He wouldn’t apologize, not outright, but the looks were enough for Finn to understand. He kept sorting, and Poe kept massaging his temples.

“When you were meditating with Skywalker earlier,” Finn said after a couple hours, “did you see anything? Y’know, like in your head.”

“I did.” He rolled an old battered grav-ball onto a stack of packed and unfolded shirts. “I was at my kitchen table back home. My mother had made fried plantains for breakfast with bantha-cheese omelettes. She was holding my hand from where she sat on the other side.”

His eyes glazed over with distance.

“That sounds really nice.”

“It was the breakfast she made me when I turned eight.” He shifted his attention back to the box, cocking his head and kneeling down to force the flaps closed. A couple more rolls of socks could have fit in the edges, but Finn didn’t push the point.

The afternoon stretched into the night, and their bunk slowly turned so sparse that it echoed. The rest of the pilot squadron had holed themselves up in one of the common areas with their hidden stashes of booze that couldn’t make the trip, but it was quickly obvious Jessika and Rey weren’t among them. Iolo and Bastian were chugging something violently purple out of the kitchen’s foggiest glasses and the sight alone was exhausting.

Poe was already curled into Finn’s bed when he made it back to the bunk, and he gazed up toward him in the doorway with an apology knit into his face. An unnecessary one, Finn noted to himself, but he said nothing as he crawled in beside him, pressing his chest to Poe’s back and his face into Poe’s hair.

Poe took his hand in his, clutched them both to his chest. The only heat that radiated there did so without the searing waves he’d felt before.

“You’re feeling better,” Finn said. It wasn’t a question.

“I… maybe.” The sigh that followed brushed the top of their hands. “How can you tell?”

“I just can, I don’t know.”

It wasn’t long before Poe drifted off to sleep, still hanging on to Finn’s hand and arm like something in his life depended on it, though Finn knew that wasn’t a comparison he should try to make. Nuzzling his nose deeper into Poe’s hair, he imagined a whole series of nights like this one, tucked up into each other because it was their favorite way to sleep, not the only way, and the line of sweat at the nape of of Poe’s neck would be subtle evidence of what left them moaning into each other’s necks moments before--

No, Finn had to yank that line of thought back before part of him decided to nudge Poe awake with it.

Poe needed his presence and support more than anything, the knowledge that he could think he was spiraling and Finn could reach a hand out to ground him. The rest of it could come later, or not at all.

He could live without knowing what those flight-hardened hands felt like on his thighs. Or clasped around his fingers at dinner. Or tracing the corner of his eye. If Poe found peace within himself, nothing else mattered or had to--but it didn’t stop the thoughts, not as he fell asleep and not as he slept. (An amorphous dream, shadowy unlike the rest he’d been having, vocalized the thrumming anxieties that had been creeping to the forefront: something about the hope that came from being in limbo and the clarity on a facet of life outside the First Order he was closer to understanding.)

Rey’s hand smacking against the door came half a moment after he stirred--Poe had turned over, facing him now and already awake, one eye squinted shut and the other blinking lazily with a grin to match, and Finn’s heart probably stopped at the sight. But then the wake-up call slammed it back into gear, sent them twitch-jumping and knocking their knees together.

“Don’t get used to me doing this every morning!” Rey said on the other side of the door. 

The sound of her footsteps faded down the hall as Poe rolled onto his back, throwing his arm over his face. He yawned with his eyes still covered by the crook of his elbow and Finn’s heart stopped this time for certain. That lurch was there, the panic of the body when it sensed it had leaned a tad too far down the wrong path; and when his blood started flowing again, the first thought he had circled right back to where it had left off the night before. Finn could feel a laugh rising in his chest and he wanted to take it, transform it into a peppering of kisses up Poe’s jaw and towards his nose.

Instead he crawled out of bed. Tapped Poe on the shoulder to make sure he was staying awake. And then they were shuffling down the same hall toward the gym again, chewing on another mealy ration bar. They met Jessika just as she was leaving the gym, walking backwards through the double doors and giving Skywalker a hard time about something or other.

“Captain Pava, I know for a fact that you’re expected in the hangar in the next three minutes,” said Skywalker.

She turned to run in a flurry of _kriff_ s, offering Finn and Poe a hi and bye pushed together into almost one syllable as she nudged past. And beyond the space where she’d been: Rey, legs tucked underneath her, snorting laughter lined with fondness. When Finn caught her eye, she ducked her head to hide it from plain view, but he could still sense the smile that stretched all the way into her heart and sent her cheeks glowing.

They joined her on the floor, expecting another round of meditation exercises, but Skywalker waved for them to get back on their feet while quickly explaining how yes, it would make sense to keep on with the meditation, familiarizing oneself with the Force, but the window was closing for Poe if these couple days were all the training he would allow himself, so they had to make it count. 

“I told you, I don’t want want anything to do with lightsabers,” Poe said. 

“Who said anything about lightsabers?” He held out in his cybernetic hand a bruised pear that he must have nicked from the kitchens. “I know it’s not the most appetizing thing on base, but it’s a good way to start out.” 

Poe’s head jerked back as the pear whizzed out of Skywalker’s palm and into Rey’s. 

“Is it going to hurt the exercise if I take a bite?” She brought the pear closer to her mouth, widening it slightly, until Skywalker pulled a tired look straight from the General’s personal supply. “Still hadn’t tried this yet, is all,” she shrugged as she tossed it back to him.

“They’re not all that great,” said Poe. “You’re not missing much.”

Finn watched Poe as he took the pear from Skywalker and turned it over in his hands, fingers running along the flat edges of the bruises and hovering above the dark centers of them where the flesh had gone soft. Even when they were bruised, Finn had thought the pears had the perfect tinge of sweetness to them, not overwhelming like some of the berries Snap and Iolo mashed for their booze and not bitter like whatever he’d spotted Ackbar snacking on at his station. 

Skywalker launched into another technical explanation of the Force, how it connected all living things but didn’t neglect everything else--and when it all started to edge away from Finn’s understanding, he nearly stopped paying complete attention until he noticed how Rey’s interest had been piqued, like this wasn’t the eighteenth time she’d heard it.

Finn tuned back in, caught Skywalker tracing the outline of a diagram in the air with his hands, the hierarchy of forces that held the universe together: gravity, bonds between the smallest particles that made up existence, all of it was overshadowed by _the_ Force. The Force could bend those others to its whim when given direction. Tapping into its power allowed you to stick a hand into the underlying fabric of everything, dig your fingers between the threads and _tug_. 

“Jedi in the age of the Old Republic were capable of incredible acrobatics,” Skywalker said. “And just by manipulating the lesser forces around them. And--” He ran a hand over his eyes, clearing his throat. “The Emperor could shoot lightning from his fingertips, harnessing control over electricity.” 

They waited for him to continue, though it took a moment as a shadow slowly slid away from obscuring his eyes. 

“Roundabout way of explaining why Jedi can move stuff like this,” Poe said after a moment.

“You’re still unsure of yourself,” Skywalker said. “I thought it would help. Besides,” he sighed with a shrug, holding the pear out just beyond Poe’s reach, “I remember being told that your first word was ‘why.’” 

Finn exchanged glances with Rey--Skywalker had known Poe’s parents?

But he moved on as quickly as he had brought it up, motioning to Poe so he could position the two of them sitting opposite each other on the floor. This appeared to be an exercise where Finn and Rey’s participation would fall more under support. A familiar presence or encouraging word if the tension in Poe’s jaw were to tighten to questionable levels. As Finn settled next to Rey by the closest wall, he waited for the worry to come, pushed ahead by the similar tide of waves rushing through Poe--but it didn’t. 

“You’ve done this before, haven’t you?” Skywalker said. “With something smaller?”

“A lot smaller,” he said.

“Recently?”

Poe nodded, and Skywalker mirrored him with an added grin.

Even before Skywalker started on the teaching, Finn noticed the hold of Poe’s body shift: he strained at something while a few isolated creases in his face unfolded. Skywalker stared at him, tilted his head as he kept talking, holding the pear up to the empty space it was to cross. Slowly Poe’s hand rose from his knee with fingers extended.

The pear wobbled off the edge of Skywalker’s hand and bounced against the floor, pressing new bruises.

“Were you listening to me?” Skywalker picked up the pear and brushed a few pieces of lint that had rolled around the stem.

“Um.”

“I’m not going to be mad if you weren’t, Poe.”

“I’d already done it,” he said, “so I thought you were saying things I already knew.” Poe ducked his head toward the wall where he and Rey sat, and for a moment they locked eyes--Finn smiled, a small one, and when Poe caught it, he sent it back his way so it landed in his hands like a fireball. In his cheeks before he turned back to Skywalker there still sat the flush of the heat.

“Well, I don’t think I was,” Skywalker sighed. “It feels like you’re fighting yourself, and that’s only going to drain you. Work _with_ yourself, not against.”

“I thought that was the whole point.” Poe stared at Skywalker and waited for him to offer some acknowledgement of the point he was trying to hint at. “I’m training to help stop this.”

“What do you mean by ‘this’?”

“Wh--you--are you being difficult on purpose?”

“He is,” Rey called, grimacing. “Try to play along.”

Poe’s hands ran up to his hair, gripped there tightly, pulling for half a moment until he could bear to look Skywalker in the eye again. “Kylo Ren pushed me towards the Dark Side. I’m try to fight that. Why would I do anything but work against it?”

“Just try.” Skywalker held the pear up again, but his arm drooped after a moment, bringing the fruit closer to his face. “The old stories always said fear was the first step to the Dark Side. If that were true, everyone would always have one foot across that line. Fear isn’t something you need to destroy, Poe, not even fear of yourself.”

Poe’s eyes fell to his hands as they sat on his knees, palm up, waiting for the pear to be offered again--embracing fear, that was something Finn couldn’t imagine had crossed Poe’s mind often, if ever. Fear of the enemy, of First Order TIE fighters, of Kylo Ren himself: had it ever occurred to him to pause before rushing in? Poe’s hands looked too empty held that way, like they needed another pair to close them shut and guide them through the terror he must have been trying to ignore, and Finn’s hands could fit. Finn knew fear intimately, could break it off into smaller parts if it would make the shadows less daunting. Or just hold those hands in his own. Offer warmth in the face of the chill that rippled down through the center of your bones when it hit.

Skywalker held the pear between them for less than a few seconds before it gently floated into Poe’s palm.

“Easier that time, wasn’t it?”

“But--”

“Did it feel the same?” 

Poe didn’t answer, just tossing the pear back towards Skywalker so they could repeat the exercise. When he brought it to him this time, it flew faster in the air, and Finn caught Rey cocking her head to the side, sensing something that must have been beyond the range of his senses. 

Again and again Finn watched the pear cross the space between them, sometimes zipping and other times lazily lolling along in the air, and all the while Skywalker pressed upon bruises under Poe’s own skin, waiting for something. Anything. 

Half an hour into the rote cycle of the pear, Finn still couldn’t pinpoint what Skywalker was looking for, but as the questions pressed further--“When was the first time you remember hearing about the Rebel Alliance? Were there any subjects Shara and Kes wouldn’t touch, with you or with each other? Tell me about Muran”--the pear slammed harder and harder into Poe’s palm. When Skywalker said Muran’s name, it landed so hard a small dribble of juice ran down the inside of his wrist. 

Anger flushed up Poe’s neck and past his jawline, rolled outwards from where his knees pressed against the concrete floor--Finn felt it against his own legs and then again as it ebbed. Was this the anger he’d been fighting, distrustful of its apparent lure further into the Dark? Could Poe not discern between the flavors that anger could take as it bubbled under the skin with the bright way he looked out at the galaxy? Because Finn knew about Muran, if not from him--Poe had been off-world on a mission and Finn had come across Karé and Iolo pouring a half-glass of booze onto a tuft of grass by the tarmac. And Snap had caught him, explained the story with the little detail that came from already having defected before Muran’s name became a sensitive thorn in their palms. 

The pear continued to fly between them, sometimes zooming into a blur and others--at Skywalker’s insistence--moving at a more leisurely pace, and Finn couldn’t tear his eyes away from Poe’s careful, focused face. Watching him, he felt his heart growing under his bones, crowding out the rest of him with the weight of emotion pumping through it--was Poe Dameron’s lens to the rest of existence so barely smudged by spite and ill-intent that he could only assume that anger was a monolith, a singularity? 

They learned about anger in the First Order--a history of Darth Vader, a warped history to be sure, but parts of it had to be rooted in truth, even if the sources were all oral and pressed into odd shapes by the hands of memory. Vader grew angry that he couldn’t save his companion from death, and he slaughtered in the name of whoever could give him the answer. To Phasma, that was admirable: _doing what needed to be done_. She never said if Vader ever saved them.

(“Of course he did,” Zeroes had said, Nines nodding beside him; but Finn had doubted. Still did--) 

 _Your anger is not the same as Vader’s, it could never be the same, not the source or the outcome or the specifics of its pulse--_

_Who lied to you? Was it Kylo Ren or yourself? Was it both? Who was louder?_

He nearly jumped out of his skin when Rey laid a couple fingers outside his wrist. 

“Tabala just poked her head in,” she whispered in his ear. “They need some more hands to pack up the ships.” She glanced back at Skywalker and he waved an approval for them to step out, though Finn suspected they didn’t quite need it. Not from him.

He couldn’t find the end of Poe’s line of sight until he was halfway out the door, and there was that smile again--he tried to match it but as it struck him square in the chest, he could only gape helplessly while the air crawled back in his lungs. It was only a moment. Rey’s hand had taken hold of his wrist when he had slowed and she pulled him through the doorway and into a corridor that echoed with the near-chaos Tabala must have hinted at.

“Can I let go now or do you still need help keeping up?”

He sighed and she promptly dropped his wrist. A couple different questions had lined up once he had processed what was happening--if this meant they would soon be leaving for Selvaris, where the cargo was all supposed to fit--but as he opened his mouth, she managed to cut him off with a smirk that left him waiting for an explanation.

“What?” he asked finally when it didn’t come.

“Poe really loves you,” she said. As if it were no big deal.

As if it weren’t an _enormous deal_.

“Okay,” she said. “Now it’s my turn to say ‘what.’” She stepped in front of him before they rounded the corner back into Aurek Wing. “You’re not telling me something.”

“That’s a pretty vague statement, so I’m not exactly sure what you’re talking about,” he said quickly. “Specifically, I mean. I mean, I never told you I had skipped on the ‘fresher the morning you and Skywalker came back--”

She stared at him like she was ready to roll her eyes any second--not that he had expected the diversion to work, but it was worth the try. It would buy time for his head to kick into gear.

“Is there something--well, _you know_... between you two?” she asked, voice low.

“I…”

The easy answer would be _yes_ , but Finn doubted whether it was the truthful answer. _Yes_ was what he wanted to say, taking Rey’s remark about Poe loving him at the face value that would fit the story that sat just parallel to the one he had been living.

“It’s complicated,” he sighed. “Come on, Tabala is probably wondering where we went.”

“You’re not getting off that easily!” She stepped to the side as he tried to move around her. “You’re my friend and I can understand complicated.”

“Fine.” He ran his hands over his face, placed them on his hips. Eyed a couple spots over Rey’s shoulder while his heart pounded in his ears. “I love him and he knows. Because I told him. But we’re not--we’re not like you and Jessika. So whatever Force thing told you he loves me should have clarified what it meant.”

“Oh.” 

“And it’s fine, I’ve accepted it, I just--” 

And for the third time in about as many minutes, she wordlessly shut him up--her hand slid into his and squeezed, staying there warm and firm until they arrived at the swarm of pilots and analysts in the maze of boxes and crates that had sprung up in the hours since breakfast. Finn could still feel the warmth from her grasp long after they were delegated to different groups, and it was an added comfort when he overheard Tabala and Iolo discussing what they’d overheard the General planning for a briefing after dinner--leaving for Selvaris at first light, the routes and strategies to take to avoid detection. So much of it sounded like matters she would have asked Poe to consult on and he wondered how long she had thought about it, how much she had been tempted to pull him from Skywalker’s lessons before the memory of Galantos grew too tall. 

(Skywalker had to have been telling her that Poe was improving. If anything, she had to have felt it for herself.)

After dinner in the situation room, Finn found himself squeezed between Jessika and Poe on an unused empty crate with one of Rey’s hands tapping a beat on the toe of his shoe. On the ground, she sat with her shoulders pressed up to Jessika’s knees, completely unaware of how Kaydel was staring at the two of them from over Ackbar’s shoulder across the room.

Poe leaned into his shoulder as the General spoke, nodding along with every strategy point she laid out, tensing slightly only when she mentioned the Falcon taking the Corellian Trade Spine to around Coruscant while the rest of the ships split off on western routes to Selvaris: Jessika and Snap leading two X-wing squadrons while Chewbacca was on his way back from Kashyyyk to help shuttle the rest of the base. The Falcon would be piloted by Rey, Poe, and himself, the news delivered by the General with a look of _don’t act so surprised_.

Everyone retreated back to their bunks afterwards, making the final sweeps for forgotten socks and rations, Finn presumed, but the second the door closed behind him, Poe turned around and fell into an embrace. Shoved his face between Finn’s neck and shoulder, wrapping his arms up his back. He was breathing heavily as Finn hugged him back, heavier when Finn tightened his hold.

“Hey,” he said just loudly enough that he could hear it over his pounding heart. “What’s going on?”

“A lot’s been changing,” Poe said into his shirt. He pulled back, studying Finn’s face with a heaviness that Finn could feel against his skin. “I’m just glad I have you." 

“You do have me. I’m not going anywhere.”

Their faces were close. The lone bulb overhead was dim but Finn could still count the individual hairs of the day’s worth of beard around his mouth and the different shades of brown in his eyes--four, it looked like, but maybe there were more when his pupils weren’t smothering the irises. 

“Good.”

Finn had never seen lips that pink, where Poe’s teeth had just sank, tight and brief and leaving a bright flush right along the center; and he wanted to echo Poe’s _good_ but his voice was caught in his throat, and wouldn’t it be more efficient anyway to give it to him directly without all the extra space in between? It would, and Poe’s lips would fit right against his own like they were made to, and Poe must have had the same idea because he had inched closer, paused, then inched again.

Finn leaned forward only for Poe to pull back, shaking his head.

“I’m sorry.”

“No, I’m--don’t be.” His head was spinning as Poe turned to their packed bags between the two beds.

“It’s, um…” Poe had become very interested with his own feet and the lines separating the blocks of concrete that made up the floor, massaging his temple. “I think I’m going to turn in and--uh. Might try sleeping over here tonight.” He pointed at the bed that had been empty the past couple days.

“Okay. Whatever you need,” he said. “I need to go to bed too, anyway.”

When the light shut off, Finn’s thoughts circled around Rey’s remark, what she had meant by it, how much had been lost trying to put words to it. They circled until sleep claimed him, starting up again in the silence of the earliest hours of morning when his mattress sank against an extra weight and a familiar warmth shifted against his back and gripped against his chest.


	3. Chapter 3

The sky had just turned orange above the treeline, a brighter orange than was usual for D’Qar, but Jessika suspected that it had something to do with the flurry of orange-clad pilots sprinting around the tarmac. The lonely planet was sad to see them go and wished to send them off in the only way it knew how.

It was a nice thought that did little to distract from the fact that this was technically first light, that soon they were going to be late taking off according to the General’s orders, and that Rey still hadn’t emerged from the base doors. Jessika leaned against the ladder to the cockpit of her ship, freshly repaired from the mishap at Galantos, and rolled her helmet along the concrete under the sole of her boot.

The antsiness brought a scowl to her face before she recognized the familiar pull in her muscles. All missions had risks, but this one felt like it had even fewer despite the lack of plans to drop into a conflict or wade into enemy territory, and still her skin felt too tight in the anticipation. To see Rey--and Poe and Finn too--before they parted ways for the trip, that wasn’t being clingy, that wasn’t being unreasonable. But an old voice rusty with disuse piped up in the back of her head and the only thing that got it to quiet down was the front she’d built.

She’d learned with the second batch of them that new recruits got a short and sweet warning about the front, so enough people must have thought it was a natural part of her instead of a habit.

(Rey hadn’t, though. Rey had pushed right through.)

“General Organa asked me to give you the coordinates for Black Squadron’s route.”

Jessika glanced down to find a small holopad shoved under her nose. At the end of the arm that held it there was one of a handful of people that could have made the morning any worse.

“Thanks, Kaydel,” she said stiffly, pointedly not looking back up.

“So…”

“What?”

“You and that Rey girl seem to be getting on pretty well,” she said, and her attempts at coming off casual hadn’t gotten any less transparent. “What’s going on there?”

“Y’know, I’m not sure,” she said lightly. “How’s your wife?”

“She’s…” Kaydel managed to catch her eye, and Jessika found that it was more sheepish than she expected. “Yan is good. Got a holo from her last night.” At that, she turned on her heel toward the next ship in the line, already calling Nien Nunb to crawl down so she wouldn’t have to throw the holopad up to him.

The sky had edged a little closer to pink, a little closer to their ETD, and the smart thing would have been to stay by the ship. Wait for the General or any of the other officers to start shouting about warming up the engines and reviewing formations, the final countdown to an operation like this. But Jessika still wanted to find Finn and give him a hard time about landing the Falcon better on Selvaris than he did on Dantooine. And tell Poe that she’d managed to talk to Kaydel without a single curse word. And Rey, whom she was so sure of, whatever she’d said to Kaydel be damned, and it was straining at her ribs more than ever to keep it all inside. The pressure had always come for her from the outside, bending inwards, and it had never occurred to her that it would hurt worse the other way around.

A brassy glare from the sunrise caught in the corner of her eye and threw her thoughts off balance--

“Hey! _Threepio!_ ”

He was tottering off toward one of the shuttles at the back of the airfield, R2D2 close behind and whistling indignantly at her outburst. “Oh, Captain Pava, good morning!” he said once he approached her x-wing. “Artoo and I were just going to check that the shuttles were ready to go--”

“Where’s Rey and Poe and all of them?”

R2D2 beeped a few times, rolling his head toward the base and back to C3PO--Jessika’s binary was pretty solid, but half of what came out of his speakers still eluded her.

“They’re all back at the command center, I believe. Princess L--General Organa was filling Chewbacca in on what was discussed at the briefing yesterday… oh, all right, off you go then…”

She was already running back toward the base entrance, at least leaving C3PO to rattle off the rest of whatever he had to say with an audience, and shouldered her way through the door of the situation room. The door swung back against the wall with a loud thwack that for once wasn’t drowned out by the tense chatter and blaring consoles: the General was speaking to Chewbacca in a low voice, his rumbled replies muted, and the others stood to the side, silent.

“Did I miss something?”

“No,” Finn said with a shrug. “We were just--there, told you, Poe. Nothing to worry about.”

Jessika turned and saw one of the mechanics dashing toward the tarmac, her hand sliding along the door she’d just propped open, and BB-8 rolled straight to Poe’s feet. Their joyful whirs and beeps were the loudest thing in the room besides their fresh orange paint; Poe knelt down to their eye level as he always did, trying to get a hold on the droid to--embrace them? Jessika wasn’t sure, but BB-8 kept wriggling, bumping into Poe’s knees, then Rey and Finn’s feet, going on and on about something too quickly for Jessika to decipher.

“Guess you needed quite the tune-up, huh, buddy?” Poe said.

BB-8 beeped in reply, hurriedly again--something about the mission everyone was talking about, that much she picked up.

“Yeah, I know you want to fly with me again but…” The grin Poe offer them was a little bit pained, not enough for them to notice. “I gotta go in the Millennium Falcon for this trip. But--but!”

BB-8’s head had drooped at the news--far too emotive for a droid that couldn’t even speak Basic, and then Poe was back on his feet and tugging at the elbow to Jessika’s flight suit.

“Maybe Jess will let you fly with her!”

She expected to find his face imploring, implying a favor that she could cash in some vague amount of time down the line, but the hopefulness he held was less begging than it was an outstretched hand-- _don’t get weird, let me do this for you_.

Her chest tightened as the corner of his mouth twitched slightly.

“You’ve never been in an X-wing without Poe,” Jessika said, kneeling down after a beat. “That wouldn’t be a problem, would it?”

 _Absolutely not!_ they beeped, rolling forward and ducking their head down to bump her on the knee.

“We would’ve been outside earlier,” Finn said as she stood back up. “But…”

“Few last minute adjustments,” Rey finished for him, smiling tightly enough that Jessika knew it was meant only for her. It held the same angles as the night before as they fell asleep in the bunk they had shared since their last return; though that one had been wider, more lined by sweat and skin flushed with a pulsing heated reminder of the last hour. Jessika could still feel Rey’s timid hands as they had slid down her body, how she had been hesitant at first before picking her apart thread by thread. She hoped that it was invisible how her face burned with it.

Finn nodded toward the door, and they followed his lead back out to the tarmac--most of the Resistance had gathered there by now, staring at a sky that was churning out new shades of magenta and lavender that reached higher above their heads. BB-8 stayed close to her heel while Finn and Poe waved on their way to the Falcon, deep in conversation on whether Chewbacca’s son was really named “Lumpy” or if it was just a nickname.

Rey stalled at her side as she slowed by her ship. “I mean, I might have to side with Poe on this one,” she said, grinning as BB-8 rolled around the ship to get their bearings. “‘Lumpy’ could be like how ‘Chewie’ is short for ‘Chewbacca,’ maybe.” She laid a hand on the bottom slat of the ship’s wing, glancing toward the center where the crowd had continued to grow and then back at Jessika. She squinted against the light reflecting off the metal.

It was unbearable, suddenly more so than it had ever been--and something close to adrenaline but maybe more like a pure shot of courage leaped into Jessika’s veins because she stepped very close to Rey’s face, catching every freckle and shimmer of sweat.

“Hello there,” she grinned.

“Do you care?” Jessika asked, tongue tripping over itself.

“Do I care about what?”

“If people know we’re together.”

“No,” she said, squinting slightly. “I knew you did, though, so--”

Finn was calling for her from across the airfield; she grimaced and took her hand, squeezed it apologetically, and turned to jog to where the Falcon had been docked. Everyone was running late, after all, and Chewbacca’s roaring was getting louder, closer to emerging beside the General from the base doors.

“Rey, wait!”

Sprinting, it only took a few strides to catch up to her, rest a hand on her shoulder to slow them both down--down to a pace like molasses as Jessika put a hand on Rey’s back and another at the back of her head. Dipping her like she had seen in Nai-Nai’s old holovids and kissing her with a promise that would hold until they both landed on Selvaris.

Time sped up again and Rey’s hands grappled for a hold in her hair, pulling her closer until they almost toppled over. And between the brief gaps of their lips, Jessika swore there was a sound like laughter complementing the tender brush of fingertips tracing lines down her cheeks.

The tarmac had gone quiet, but neither of them noticed until Finn let out a _whoop_ from the far end of it.

Jessika pulled back enough to take in Rey’s face even as she half-chased her lips up; and she let them hold like that, near parallel to the ground, and Jessika’s grip on her only started to waver when the grin enveloping her field of vision was softer than she expected--bright, yes, but in a way that made the rest of her expression all wobbly. And it spread through Jessika’s arms and and into a thought: _I’ve never felt like this about someone before_.

“If you’re quite done, Captain Pava, I’d appreciate everyone’s full and undivided attention.”

Both of them snapped to the closest thing to attention the Resistance had, blushing furiously and overly aware at how the entirety of the organization was alternating between staring at them and staring at the General, who had appeared with Chewbacca at her side likely within the minute.

Despite the General’s firm tone, her mouth was set in a smirk.

“The Resistance didn’t start on D’Qar, but it found a home here,” the General said. “I never anticipated staying on one planet--and just one planet--for this long, but time was bound to run out eventually. And now is that time. We were lucky that we could choose when we left here… that we weren’t chased out. So I want to remind you: when you’re part of a group like this, your base is where you sleep and recharge, but it is not your home. A home offers security, but as long as you are part of the Resistance that security cannot be guaranteed fully. Only degrees of it can.

“We’re going to be starting over from scratch on Selvaris, so let’s work to make it a solid center of operations--but don’t grow complacent. This fight is far from over.”

Chewbacca roared beside her, tipping his head up toward the brightening sky, and she nodded--maybe in agreement with what he said, or maybe just to herself.

“That being said, you’re a fine group of rebels, and to see that the spirit didn’t die with the Alliance--”

The group grew even quieter, if it were possible, and a lump rose in Jessika’s throat.

“Anyway… you have your assignments!” And the old air of the General was back. “I will see you on Selvaris. May the Force be with you.”

The chatter of the rest of the squadron rose to a roar as they ran to their respective ships; Rey had remained beside her, gently winding her fingers through the rough fabric of Jessika’s flight gloves, searching for the hint of an actual hand beneath it all.

“I have to get back to the Falcon,” she murmured.

“I know, I know.” Jessika brought her close, kissed her deeply until they were both struggling between pressing closer together and pausing to breathe. “Be safe.”

“You too.” Rey pulled her into a tight hug. “You hear that BB-8? Be _safe_.”

 _Wouldn’t dream of being anything but!_ they whistled.

With one last squeeze at her hand, Rey turned and ran back toward the Falcon, where Finn and Poe had already stepped nearly chest-to-chest, speaking directly into each other’s ears like they weren’t already more than a grav-ball field away from the rest of the Resistance. But these questions that had started to form were for another time.

Or, as Nai-Nai always said, “Don’t ask why the sky is blue when your shirt is on fire.”

(She owed her a call. When they got to Selvaris, she would call home.)

* * *

 

The Falcon was among the first ships to take off--not because it had the longest route to take, which it did, but because it was all part of the _strategy_. And if Poe thought that last word with a tinge of bitterness, the feeling ebbed quickly. He may not have been part of this planning session, but for the first time since Mustafar, he could imagine himself back there again; reluctant to attribute any of the feeling to the handful of days training under Luke, he focused on being back in a cockpit, all the knobs and buttons winking under his fingers and the black infinity of the galaxy spread out before him. 

It was the copilot’s seat, to be fair, but it was the cockpit all the same.

The Falcon was old. Rey knew her way around it like she had sat at Han Solo’s side the entire war, knew which knobs needed to be squeezed just so to keep from falling off and which status lights could be ignored because the switch had gotten fried. “Oh that,” she said, shrugging. “Han said that shorted out on some job he took on a water planet a few years before meeting Master Luke. The oxygen levels on the lower deck aren’t _actually_ that low.”

“He was sure about that?” Poe’s thoughts kept returning to Finn testing that the gunner wouldn’t fall apart on them.

“Positive.”

“How will we know if they are?”

“Are you all right?” She plopped back down in her seat from where she had been inspecting some wires along the ceiling and raised an eyebrow. “This is the same ship we were in a few days ago, you know.”

And he knew that. It was a hard shift to explain: the Falcon that had taken them and Jessika and Bastian around the galaxy had a separate mission, one that wouldn’t necessarily attract a neon target to the hull with all the rest of the space traffic trickling out of the Ileenium system that morning. All very irrational, not a becoming trait in someone looking to regain their commander status.

Her kind, imploring face would have been easy to confess to, but now was not the time. “Not to change the subject--”

“But you’re going to anyway, I’m guessing.”

“Jessika really likes you.”

The way her teeth bit down on her bottom lip, Poe could tell she was trying to keep the smile from splitting her face wide open. The effort was somewhat futile, the warmth of it burning her cheeks crimson. He could have said more, but he would leave it--undoubtedly she could sense the magnitude of the gesture deep in her chest. Right at the center of it, warm like a wrench left out in the sun. Or maybe he was just projecting.

After a moment, she stole a couple quick glances toward him, swatted his feet away from the dashboard. “Is it the same way you like Finn?” 

“I--what?”

“You heard me.”

That wasn’t a question he could even answer when he asked himself, silent, with his whole body slotted against Finn’s. Nights stacked on top of each other, each one holding a memory of staring at himself in the mirror of the fresher, _don’t do this, don’t sleep in his bed again_. And right beside it: a memory of how he caved, crawled into the sheets thick with a scent that he hadn’t ever attributed to Finn but that couldn’t be anyone else. Hands on hands, pads of toes twitching against thin skin and bones.

 _You’re weak, but you knew that. It’s how you got in trouble in the first place_.

That refrain was quieter than it had been, but the presence still stung.

He kept his mouth shut and the stars whipped by, as blurry and streaky as they could be without jumping to lightspeed. The nearest hyperspace lanes that could take them the long way around the Core were still a couple hours out and it was a long time to let fill with silence--at the very least, he insisted to himself, he could press back against the lie that said he was weak. He could call it a lie again and again.

_If I was weak I would’ve taken up Kylo Ren’s offer. I would still be on that star destroyer._

“Or maybe you didn’t,” Rey sighed. “That’s okay.”

“I don’t know what I would say,” Poe said. “It’s… complicated.”

She nodded, flipped a couple more controls. Banked the ship to the left, muttering something about the choice of hyperspace lanes and staying inconspicuous, brief doubts and worries that he could sympathize with. “Isn’t everything?”

“Well… some things shouldn’t be,” he said.

“Exactly.”

Some things should have been the simplest in the galaxy.

Flying, for one. The steady movement forward, every angle up and down and side to side open with the pull of a wrist on the yoke. Even when you added combat and blaster fire, it was the flying that remained the same. The flying could never change. Everything else was just noise.

And others, too. Flying wasn’t the only simple thing in the galaxy, but maybe it was the hardest to corrupt. Family should have been simple, but then there was war. The aftershocks of war, finding what it had forgotten to finish and determined to close it all out this time--but with a fickle memory the resurgences were never quite done. Never quite done finding a bloodline and sticking a dam in it, letting it run dry and the beds beneath it crack.

Love should have been simple, too, but the people who loved never let it be.

“Gold Team, roll out,” the comms crackled. The third wave leaving D’Qar after Blue Squadron, a couple refurbished Y-wings and A-wings with the Resistance’s shuttles. The officers spread out among the personnel who couldn’t fly themselves, mechanics and analysts and the droids, Chewbacca at the helm with his legs squeezed in the tight spaces. Poe had seen those shuttles before even if he hadn’t flown them, and even with the General’s hand on his furry shoulder, he doubted if the rough warbling complaints could be kept at bay.

“It’s a good thing we haven’t heard anything from Snap and all them, right?” Rey asked.

“We would’ve heard if they ran into trouble.”

“Good.”

“And we’ll hear if Black Team runs into trouble once they take off.”

“Good, that’s good.”

The Falcon continued on, bolstered by the fall in conversation. As if the rate of words dropping to the floor unsaid was tacked on to the ship’s speed as a whole. The junction of the Rimma Trade Route and Hydian Way was fast approaching if Poe was reading the coordinates correctly, not that he was doubting himself on it for once--but the ship had started to whine as Rey pulled the levers and knobs to prepare for the jump to hyperspace, and Finn’s footsteps clanged closer until he fell into the seat behind him.

“The gunner’s about as good as it’s ever been since we’ve had it,” he said breathlessly. He was barely sitting in the seat, Poe noticed; it appeared he was using it mainly for balance as he leaned forward onto his knees. “Gold Team get off okay?”

“No problems so far,” Poe said.

Finn sighed in relief, reached out to rub Rey’s arm. Pausing before doing the same to Poe’s, though it was no less warm. Not that he expected it to be--no, Poe had only worried that the night before had made something shift between them where before there had been a precarious balance. Precarious but stable all the same.

Poe had almost kissed him, and Finn was ready to meet him halfway. And it was almost perfect until he’d remembered there was still no reason to think that a few days of Force training would have swept all the risks aside. Again this morning on the tarmac they’d come together close--“We can still share a bunk on Selvaris even if it’s just a tent, right?” Finn had asked, right in his ear.

“I thought you would’ve known you didn’t have to ask,” Poe murmured back. “Even after last--”

“It’s fine.” And Finn had grinned wide like he did, like he had always since he first met him in that cramped alcove on the Finalizer, and he had been ready to take after Jessika’s example. Poe may never have contributed to the messy web of relations that strung the Resistance together--but he had still managed to get a reputation for being a romantic during his time at the Academy, though none of the stories from that squadron had made their way to D’Qar. And if they had, Snap and Iolo and Karé and the rest of them would have been waiting for him to dip Finn that dramatically. They would have picked up the cues ages ago.

It was no use dwelling on what could have been. If his father had taught him anything, it was that.

“All right, you two. Hold on,” Rey said. The stars pulled into streaks and the Falcon jettisoned them into the hyperspace lane, the swirl of blues and indigos its own sort of comfort. “Rimma to Corellian and then out around Pantolomin. Easy enough.”

“Very,” Finn said, then adding to Poe, “Right?”

“We’ll be fine,” he said. “We’ll all be fine.” He stood to stretch his legs--his knees had been giving him trouble every so often since his last birthday. It wasn’t pain, just a misplaced pressure behind the kneecap, and nothing that a little pacing wouldn’t fix.

The pacing would be good for the rest of him too.

He made his way to the long corridor that curved around the ship, bending up his knees every couple of slow steps while eyeing the dirt and grime that had accumulated along the wall’s piping. Some of it was dark enough to be soot from blaster fire--from the days of the Empire maybe? His chest panged at the thought, the center of it growing warm like he was used to now, but instead of the overwhelming, near-heady rush it had calmed to a gentle pulse. Steady waves reaching back to the cockpit for Rey and Finn and then outwards towards Luke and the General, any traces of the Blue and Black Squadrons.

He searched for the anger and found it, dug a bit deeper for the hate and found that as well, shallow as it was. He didn’t suppose that it would ever go away, not even if the First Order was destroyed; the damage had already been done, a tenuous film of peace torn down the center with an chunk of metal from a downed old-model TIE fighter and a whole host of people both in and outside his circle with deep-set bruises from Ren’s fingers.

The pulse in his chest quickened and his fingers twitched toward a fist, not quite making it.

On Yavin 4, there had been a native fruit that was only found at the tallest branches, high enough to warm themselves in the sun above the underbrush as they grew bulbous and heavy, red-ripe. His father couldn’t stand the messy juices nor the odd, tangy aftertaste but his mother loved them enough that every morning on her birthday Poe would wake up to her voice a ways outside his window--always the same, drawing out his father’s name, sitting on the vowel ( _Ke-es_ ), insisting it wasn’t important enough for him to risk breaking every bone in his body climbing up there. And he nearly did one time when Poe was five: the traitorous branch cracking in the quiet of the morning, his parents shouting, a web of vines catching his father before more than his wrist could get damaged.

His chest calmed running through the memories year by year--until it tightened again as he wondered if this newfound ability with the Force could have retrieved them easier.

Not that it mattered anymore.

But he played out the scenario: his mother standing beside him at the edge of the brush with wrinkles that never had the chance to fold into her face, watching as the fruit slowly floated right into her hands.

Realizing he had closed his eyes, he opened them again to find Finn standing before him in the hall. “Hey…” he said, ignoring the now-fritzing burn on his breastbone. “Is something going on?”

Finn shrugged. The set of his shoulders was tenser than the shrug let on. “Rey wants us all in the cockpit. There were some weird transmissions from Blue Team, and Black Team is about to take off, and--”

“Weird like what?” And when Finn shrugged again, Poe reached for his shoulder, guiding them both back toward where Rey now sat alone. The urge to slip his hand into Finn’s raised its head and surely since last night he should push it back down, but he could save his supply of reason for a later, better time.

He laced his fingers with Finn as they moved, warm and firm, but Finn pulled them to a stop; the cockpit was just around the corner and the buzzing static of the comms coming in and out felt louder as they stared at each other in silence.

“Poe,” he said finally. “What is this?”

“Can I let you know when I figure it out?” Their intertwined hands were held up between them, and Poe squeezed there, watching Finn’s face.

Finn squeezed back and his face eased into a grin that was toeing a melancholy line. “I… really want to kiss you right now,” he whispered.

 _Me too, me too_ \--but Mustafar flashed up behind his eyes, the sulfur-tinged air and the dark reaches of ugliness reaching up out of his chest--and even if he could swallow it all, his mouth would still be bitter with it, rubbing off on Finn’s tongue and down his throat where Poe never wanted it to go.

“Might not be the best idea,” he said. And he repeated the line in his head as Finn nodded, tugging them back toward the cockpit. He repeated it over and over even as it was accompanied by the image of him pushing Finn up against the corridor wall with his head in his hands, out of body, noticing how his own eyes were darker than they should have been.

“Black Team just left D’Qar,” Rey said when they arrived. “And Snap just radioed over these coordinates without much explanation why.”

Poe gave them a once-over; they put Blue Team somewhere between Belgaroth and Phu, near where they were set to pick up some of the black-market hyperspace lanes the General had heard of to navigate around the Unknown Regions. No known galactic anomalies existed in that sector of the Core that could cause them any trouble.

“His comms cut off before I could get a real answer,” she continued. “Make sure Black Team got them too. They’ll…” She took a deep breath and readjusted her hold on the controls. “They’ll be there soon enough.”

* * *

 

A few minutes before passing through the orbit of the Ileenium system’s farthest planet, Jessika’s console lit up like Corulag’s New Year fireworks--an odd occurrence, especially seeing as she wasn’t headed toward surface of some planet, nose first and engines in flames. But then she caught the display, BB-8’s shrill beeping scrolling through in Basic.

“Black Leader, is everything all right?” Karé said over comms. “My astromech could hear BB-8 across formation.”

“It’s all dandy at the moment, Black Two,” she sighed. “But I’ll let you know if that changes.”

“Well, I’d hope so.”

Jessika let her laugh go over the transmission as she reread BB-8’s message: _Millennium Falcon received the following coordinates from Blue Team. Comms cut out before Blue Leader could explain_.

“Okay, BB-8, what are you thinking?”

 _It could be anything_ , they said through the monitor. _An asteroid field nearby could mess up their signal or they cut off the transmission too early or they ran into--_

She didn’t need to read the next couple words to know what they were worrying about; waiting to take off after the rest of the base had been abandoned, BB-8 regaled Jessika with tales of how the repair mechanics and rest of the droids in that spare hangar had kept them up to speed how Poe had been lost then found, and maybe still a little lost, in a way. ( _Not that I had ever doubted him_ , they’d said.)

BB-8 was right, though: it could have been a number of things, and waiting until her squadron arrived in that sector of the Core was only asking for the slice of good luck afforded to them at Galantos to be returned in full. She had her squadron’s lives to think about--that, and her promise to Rey. “I’m going to give you a transmission frequency and some coordinates, and I’m going to need to you send a message, okay?”

Jessika repeated the information three times, and still BB-8 paused for a moment before offering a beep of confirmation that it had been sent.

_Are you sure that was safe information to send? If anyone else picked that up--_

“I’ve only known one person to mess around frequencies in that range,” she said. “We’ll be okay.”

Unsure how long it would take to get a reply about the coordinates, Jessika radioed the rest of Black Team to check if they had heard from any other part of the Resistance. Framed it like a routine follow up, like she was only ensuring that as the leader she knew the overall status, any changes in plan. It was for their own comfort more than hers, anyway. The jitters had been riding as high as they would for any combat mission before take off, the tarmac stiflingly quiet with it when jaunts like these were usually preceded with, what? A tad too much commotion, Major Ematt pushing through the doors from inside, grumbling how they needed to take it more seriously?

She never realized how much safer she felt when there was another squadron waiting at base to suit up if they needed reinforcements. They must have come to that conclusion earlier.

“Black Leader,” said Tharan, one of the younger recruits. “We did pick up something just now from Gold Team hopping on a spice dealer hyperspace lane near Sibensko.”

“Thank you, Black Five,” she said. “Glad to hear everything’s been going smoothly.”

This was not the kind of lying she excelled at.

 _Incoming transmission!_ BB-8 whistled. They transferred the message into the ship’s communication software and soon it was scrolling on the monitor. _Just how accurate do you think this information is--_

“Hold on, BB-8.”

As she read, she kept waiting for some snide barb about not helping them again, but it never came. In addition to the radar readings for ships around Phu and Belgaroth, Lucia had supplied an entire block of text cataloguing notable ship activity around that side of the Core, offering up a short summary that would not have been out of place on intelligence reports top Resistance officers had complied themselves. It would be useful once they were on Selvaris, but she skipped to the most pressing matter--

 _TIE fighters and star destroyers have been skulking around the innermost parts of the Inner Rim,_ Lucia had written. _They’ve been focusing at the crossroads of hyperspace lanes, likely waiting to catch ships between jumps. I guess they’ve been looking for you Resistance fighters. And I also guess you’re not with that squadron because the coordinates you gave me lit up with T-70 X-wings and those TIE fighters, and I know you wouldn’t have been able to send a message otherwise._

BB-8 let out a short beep, the equivalent of a single question mark. She sighed into her comm link to them--it was ironic, if that was the right way to word it at all, because she had told Lucia she’d been accepted to the Academy and Lucia had stared, stopped dead in the center of one the busiest hubs in the city, blurting out something about how was she expecting to be a pilot in the New Republic air fleet if she couldn’t walk and drink caf at the same time. And now, reviving that blow from the dead with a new coat of paint long after it had been proven wrong.

BB-8 didn’t need to know that and neither did anyone else.

The final line, though, smoothed the rankled knot that had collected at the back of her throat--

_Be careful… I do still worry about you, from time to time._

She allowed herself half a second to digest it completely before switching over to the squadron-wide comms. “Black Team, this is Black Leader. Blue Team ran into some First Order assholes outside the Tapani Sector and they need some backup. The hyperspace lane is coming up soon, so push your ships as far as they’ll go, all right?”

A flurry of _copy, Black Leader_ flew through her earpiece, and all around she watched as the rest of the squadron’s engines flared a little brighter as they pushed the throttle forward. Now was when Poe would offer another couple one liners for inspiration, but no matter how many times she dove back in, her head supplied her with nothing except a blank slate of fear she knew they were all trying to swallow. Fear for their friends in Blue Team, fear for themselves flying toward trouble. The deeper terror that this exodus that was meant to preserve the Resistance could end up near wiping it off the map.

“BB-8, can you get a comm link with the Millennium Falcon?” she said quickly.

There was a pause. _They’ve gone into hyperspace_ , they beeped. _I can send them a message for after they drop out--_

“Just forward them the transmission. It’s fine.”

It wasn’t.

The attack was already so intense that Snap’s comms had cut out and they were heading right toward it and sure, paging the Falcon, alone and halfway across the galaxy, just to hear their voices again, to hear Rey’s voice--that was admitting there was a chance this could end in a fireworks show fueled by her ship’s gasoline; that was rolling over to show the soft side of her covered in ghosts of dark bruises against skin that glowed it was so pale. That wasn’t something she had practice doing, any of it. But the itch under her fingers crawled up and down her arms until she could conjure up the sound of Rey’s voice, of Poe and Finn’s voices chattering in her head.

They were still going on about the last grav-ball game when the squadron hit the entry point for the Rimma Trade Route. “I’m about done with these kriffers,” she muttered.

And apparently it got sent through the comms, because Karé answered somberly, “Stars, me too.”

* * *

 “Jessika sent the coordinates to Lucia,” Rey said, pointing at the text on the monitor. Finn’s face lit up with a combination of relief and recognition as she read on, and Poe’s stomach started to sink as he saw her brow pull itself into a tight knot.

But he wanted to delay the inevitable bad news. “Who’s Lucia?”

“Jessika’s friend from her home planet,” Finn said. “She has all this tracking equipment to watch ship traffic across the galaxy. It’s how we found you, actually,” he added, quieter.

“‘Friend’ might be putting it a little simply,” she said. She was scrolling back up to reread the transmission, pausing over the inset bullet points with the raw data. “It seemed like a kind of complicated history, really. But he’s right. I don’t know if we could have found you without her.”

The wave of appreciation for this mystery woman rolling off his shoulders was short-lived as his attention was brought back to the monitor--the wave curled back on itself and sank deep into the pit of his stomach.

“All those TIE fighters are in those same coordinates with Blue Team?” he said over Rey’s shoulder.

It was a stupid question. In all his years reading charts like these and even compiling them himself, there wasn’t any way that the scenario across the Core was better than the numbers presented, yet he still knew that it wasn’t the worst that the Resistance had ever faced. The dread took that fact and smashed it under its heel and his hands started to get restless and bright with how stuck they were. How far away from an X-wing they were, unable to add another to their numbers to ensure they all landed on the other side.

“Unfortunately,” Rey said. “But Black Team is going to meet them. It’ll be all right.”

He felt the caveat that she kept to herself--it would have been more all right if they were there to help themselves, to know that they had done all they could. Here: useless, they were useless, and the joints in his hands were starting to ache just like Galantos when the General had grounded him but he had better control of himself now, right? He did, he did--a voice pushed him to Force-pull Rey’s hands from the yoke and set their course back toward the firefight, but it was small. It was small and it didn’t repeat itself, fading away as he brushed it aside.

Finn put a hand on his shoulder, and when Poe met his eyes he found a silent question asking him if he was okay. Once he nodded, Finn turned back to Rey. “How much longer until we get to Pantolomin?” he asked.

Poe wondered if he was trying to change the subject--or shift it, at least.

“Well… it looks here like we’ve still got a bit of time, but--um, not much--”

“I’ll get down to the gunner, then. Just in case,” he added.

Rey’s hands wound around the controls so tightly that the bones in her hands strained up, white and hard. Just like Snap, only hers didn’t confine itself to her hands--it spiraled up to her elbows, locked them, then crawled closer to her shoulders. _Fear_. Poe could feel it in her, the echo of it in himself. His own home-grown anxieties locked hands with hers across the space between them and soon he couldn’t tell which pangs of terror belonged to who. Though, he realized, his shoulder knocking into hers as the ship rattled through hyperspace, it probably didn’t matter.

Their hearts were hammering against their ribcages in unison, amplified by those hands still clasped over the gap. Overwhelming. Squeezing tight, a too-forceful handshake pushing down on the thin bones under the knuckles until they started to groan and the skin started to burn. Burning there and also in his chest, hot with the flashes of Jessika and Snap and Iolo and Bastian and Karé and and and--all of them zapped into nothing by green blaster fire and smoke. The Resistance scattered into galactic dust motes smaller than the lingering remains of Alderaan.

He blinked and in the black there he saw the headstone his father had made after the funeral pyre’s ashes finally cooled. He blinked again and it had crumbled.

 _No_ \--and when he blinked a third time, there was nothing. _No_. He screwed his eyes shut and focused on fried plantains mushed against a loose baby tooth, BB-8 chirping in his ear, the warm weight of Finn’s arms as he slept.

The silence when he opened his eyes was oppressive--his ears were close to ringing and the tips of his fingers felt chilled until he pressed them to his face and found them as warm as ever.

“You felt it too, right?” Rey asked quietly.

“Yeah.”

“Was… was that what it was like for you all the time? When we got you from Mustafar?”

“Not exactly,” he said.

She looked at him like she was waiting for him to continue, though he had nothing else to say. What could he have said about the anger that followed the fear that would have been useful? _Sometimes I grew so angry about the state of the galaxy I couldn’t think straight and the lights would flicker._

“We’re closing in on Pantolomin,” she murmured after a moment.

“Is everything okay up there?” Finn’s voice crackled over the comms.

“It’s fine,” she said.

“You sure?”

“As fine as we’re going to be,” Poe said. Rey glanced at him briefly and he shrugged.

“Not sure what that’s supposed to mean, man.” Finn’s sigh rattled in the microphone. “It wouldn’t hurt to be a _little_ less cryptic.”

Rey snorted at the joking turn the lilt of his voice had taken, but Poe wondered if he was talking about more than one thing. “Just nervous,” he said, trying to match Finn’s tone. “We don’t know what’s going to be on the other of this.”

It was Finn’s turn to laugh, a quick breath out the nose, that same rattling fuzz over the comms.

“There’s only one way to find out, isn’t there?” Rey said. Her hands repositioned themselves on the yoke. Paused. Flipped a couple more switches and knobs along the myriad of blinking displays vying for attention. Jerked her head at a couple more overhead for Poe to press while she gripped and regripped the yoke. “Pantolomin is straight ahead--jumping out of hyperspace in three, two--”

The stars smeared to a stop, freezing in place as the galaxy adjusted back to darkness. Pantolomin loomed ahead with its brilliant blue-green seas lighting up the view from the cockpit more than half the star clusters around it.

“Is that whole planet water?” Finn said over the comms.

“Pretty much,” Poe said. A few speckles of deep greens and brown dotted the surface but they were almost invisible at this distance. The planet was supposed to be home to near a billion who lived there full-time, never mind the tourists from every corner of the galaxy--the question of where they all fit briefly crossed his mind.

“They must have a lot of boats,” Finn said.

“You’re probably right,” he said--quietly, but not enough that the comms wouldn’t pick him up. He pictured Finn stepping off a Resistance shuttle they’d borrowed and onto a floating pier, the minty teal water rounding a perfect halo along his dark complexion as he squinted, smiling into the sun.

(Pantolomin would have to be added to that list they had. The great, brief tour of the galaxy. Yavin 4, Pantolomin--and Dantooine could probably be scratched off the list at that point, but Pantolomin would be a good replacement. A better replacement.)

“Yes, the planet’s nice and all,” Rey said, “but something doesn’t feel right.”

“Like what?” Finn asked.

It hit Poe like the fist that had landed in his first Academy sparring practice. Dread turning solid, clenching around his shoulders and stomach. The image of Finn against the Pantolomin backdrop soured: the sea turned mud-green until it faded from his mind’s eye, and then he could hardly notice its passing in the din that followed.

Three TIE fighters swooped into view and Finn and Rey let loose a string of curses--half of what came out of Rey’s mouth couldn’t have been Basic--and streams of red and green blaster fire flew past the cockpit as the Falcon banked left, right, flipping down and around with the three ships on their tail.

“How could they have known we would be here?” Finn shouted, and loudly enough that they probably could have heard him without the comms.

“Now’s not the time for questions!” Rey shouted, and the Falcon’s front end tipped upward, slamming them both back against their seats. “Just shoot them down!”

The dread still hadn’t lifted, even when the cause had revealed itself. It sank further into him and tied around the center of his chest, the knot that always burned hot when the Force was fraying his nerves--the three TIE fighters couldn’t be all they had sent after the Falcon, there had to be something else--

There were just two TIE fighters now, two and a burst of fire pushing against the empty vacuum, fading until another took its place. But the last one still managed to evade all of Finn’s shots, careful quick maneuvering sliding it out of the way with so little room to spare that a couple times Poe swore he could see sparks. Finn swore to himself as Rey kept the Falcon tight on its tail.

“Finn,” Rey said. “I really don’t like this--they’re not chasing us! Let’s just calculate the hyperspace route to Selvaris and go!”

“And let them get away knowing the Resistance has business around here?” Finn said. A couple more of his red blaster shots flew past the flat wing-like engines as the fighter banked right. “We can’t risk that!”

“Rey, he’s right. Hey,” Poe added when he saw her scowl. “I feel it too. Something is definitely wrong but that’s not the best move right now.” He pulled forward another comms set and entered in the data link for the Gold Leader shuttle. “The General should know. I don’t know if they’re in hyperspace right now but I can send it for them to get when-- _kriff_ , this ship really is old.” A couple knobs had come off in his hands and he threw them over his shoulder. The pang of guilt from desecrating _the_ Millennium Falcon would have to be addressed some other time. Not when they were flirting with the edge of something life-and-death.

“Gold Leader, this is Red Team,” he said into the comms. “Ran into First Order ships around Pantolomin. Nothing we can’t handle, but be advised we have...um…” Rey spared him a squint. There wasn’t any standard jargon for hunches. “We have a bad feeling about this.”

After he hit send, the only sounds in the cockpit came from the clunking engine and Finn’s continuing shots on the TIE fighter.

“Did we really just send a transmission to the General and kriffing Chewbacca to tell them about a bad feeling?” Finn said after a moment. “There wasn’t _anything_ we could’ve added to make that sound less ridiculous?”

Rey piped in with something about circumstances changing by the time they could receive the message, and Poe willed himself to tune out the ensuing bickering. The “bad feeling” was drawing everything into it: Rey’s frustration, his own self-doubt, Finn’s growing worry. Compounding on itself again and again--

“Wait, where did it go? Finn,” Rey called. “Do you see the TIE fighter?”

“I was about to ask you the same thing--”

The three of them stared at the empty expanse of the star system before them in silence, searching for a light pinprick in the distance to zip out of its camouflage. “I think they wanted us to follow them,” Poe murmured. A fourth presence had laid its hand against the center of his chest, lightly at first then growing until the pressure was undeniable. “We need to leave.”

“But--” Finn started.

“No, we’re leaving now,” said Poe. “Rey, turn us around--” But she was already halfway to preparing the engines to jump to hyperspace again, the frantic undercurrent of her hands latching on to him, and to Finn, who had started to talk to himself with a shakiness that reminded him of the Finalizer.

The Finalizer, and later, the nameless star destroyer where he was imprisoned again. The hand in his head, digging; and now the hand on his chest, resting for now, but wanting so badly to poke and prod until the whole of him was red and inflamed and _burning_. Poe sat back in his seat, closed his eyes. Thought of his eighth birthday and the breakfast his mother had made with the love in her palms and how that alone could have been enough of a reason to fight for the galaxy, the patch of light it had claimed after the fall of the Empire.

The pressure on his chest had softened, the frenetic energy in the Falcon easing with it.

“Almost ready,” Rey said. “Just a few more…”

“A few more what?” Finn said from below. “Rey?”

Another ship had flown into view, the unmistakable shallow arc of Kylo Ren’s shuttle.

“Oh stars,” Finn said. “That’s--okay, I’m going to shoot it down, all right? I’m shooting it down--”

Finn kept talking to himself, the Falcon’s red blaster fire cutting an outline around the shuttle; the angle wasn’t right, Poe realized, and the gunner’s limited range of motion ensured none of the shots would land. Ren must have known this, having grown up around the ship.

“Can’t go right to Selvaris now, can we?” Rey said through gritted teeth. She grabbed the controls and banked the ship sharply left--Pantolomin had faded to no more than a bright teal star in the distance and quickly fell out of view when she continued to maneuver in loops, sending his stomach churning uncomfortably. The shuttle had started to shoot back and the blasts mixed in with Finn’s, spinning in his vision, and there was no way to assess the situation, nothing for his hands to do expect grip at the dashboard and arms of his chair and hope.

“Is there a plan here?” Poe asked as the ship rocked with a landed shot. “Other than shooting him down?” She shrugged the best she could given her hands’ occupation. “Not that you two aren’t good, but I don’t think someone with Skywalker and Solo blood is going to be shot down that easily.”

“I would appreciate some other suggestions, then,” Rey shouted as she shoved the yoke forward, dipping the Falcon’s nose downwards and revealing another planet, gray and green in the distinct distant look of abandoned settlements being swallowed back into nature. “He’s right on our tail and I don’t know how much longer we can keep this up--”

The Falcon shuddered again, punctuated by a shout from Finn--every button and display on the dashboard was blinking furiously in the angriest color it could manage, warning bells whistling high over Finn’s continued yelling as it got closer, until it was behind his ear as he fell into the empty seat there.

“He hit the shields,” he said, breathless. “Saw the whole right side of it go up in flames. We gotta land this thing.” He paused to look between Rey and Poe as if to gauge their reaction. “I mean, unless you want to go out the same way. Not that _I_ want to, for the record.”

Still no one said anything. Poe could sense Rey’s desperation to find any other solution but landing on the planet before them, not that he could blame her; the three of them had more than enough reasons to want to avoid a confrontation with Ren face-to-face. _Kriff_ , he thought. _Even one of us has enough reasons to cover the other two_.

“We have less chance giving away the new base on Selvaris if we land,” Poe said after a few tense moments. “That, and getting out alive.”

“Well, when you frame it that way,” Rey said under her breath. She turned the Falcon back toward the planet, dipping its nose down at an angle suited for entering the atmosphere. “He’s stopped firing on us--this was what he wanted, I guess. Get your blasters ready.”

Poe made his way back to the main cabin where their bags still sat, thrown haphazardly among the other boxes that wouldn’t fit with the rest of the squadron making the journey. Finn’s footsteps were close behind, and he kneeled beside him to rifle through unfolded clothes to find the shirt he’d wrapped his old pistol in. Poe was making a mess of the little bit of walking room, if only to keep his hands so busy that his head couldn’t crawl too far down any one path. _Wasn’t it in the green tunic--why isn’t Finn looking for his blaster--Kylo Ren is going to make you prove Finn and Luke and everyone wrong about you--Finn still isn’t moving--_

“Poe.” Finn said it so quietly that he almost thought his head was still playing tricks on him. “I found it. Both of ours.” He pushed off a couple of the pants Poe had tossed from his bag, and the two blasters had been tucked between a line of Finn’s neatly-rolled socks.

Poe sat back on his heels, then moving to sit against the tall wall of boxes labeled with Statura’s blocky handwriting. It wasn’t long until Finn was beside him. An inch of space rested between them, and somehow he felt the nothingness there itch.

“You’re scared,” Finn said.

“Yeah.” There was no use pretending. Not now, not with him. “Aren’t you?”

“The scar on my back hurts.” He leaned forward far enough to trace it with his hand as far as his arm would let him. “I mean, it does that sometimes. But I’m trying to think about that more than how scared I am.”

Poe gently hovered his hand near the top of where he remembered the scar began. “Can I--”

“Yeah, of course.”

Even through his clothes, the scar was warm to the touch, hotter the closer it came to the bumps of his spine.

“It hurts less when you’re hand’s there,” Finn whispered.

“Finn.” The word cracked out of his throat. “This isn’t--I’m not good for--”

“Hey.” And then Finn’s hands were holding either side of his face, big and warm and loving, keeping Poe focused on his face, the eyes that were just as big and warm and loving, a comforting dark that could soothe his heart before the beat grew erratic. “Yes you are.”

“You didn’t let me finish.” Surely Finn could feel his cheeks burning hot under his hands by now, but they still didn’t flinch away. “Out there… it could get ugly, you know.” He winced and Finn’s hands only gripped at him more tightly.

“I’ve seen ugly,” he said. “You’re nowhere close.”

Poe opened his mouth to say something--he hadn’t decided yet quite what it was supposed to be other than a denial because _Mustafar_ , because of all the parts of himself he was sure Finn hadn’t seen, but Rey cut across him from the cockpit.

“We’re going to be on the ground in two minutes,” she said. “Sending a message out with our location… the map says this is Ord Mirit? Does that sound right?”

“Think so,” Poe called. An old Imperial base abandoned not long after the Battle of Endor--that would explain the overgrowth he’d spotted.

The Falcon shuddered against the thickening atmosphere, roaring with the friction, and all seemed far too still and quiet when they felt the ground thud up to meet them. But a whine followed close behind, the shrill engine of the shuttle they’d seen zip away from Takodana. Finn’s hands had fallen from his face, landing on his knee, then his hand once they stood and joined Rey near the exit. He linked their little fingers together and squeezed once before letting go, nodding once to Rey before the ramp descended on the dusty earth already illuminated by the red glow of a lightsaber.

* * *

 

Before giving the signal for Black Team to drop out of hyperspace, Jessika took a deep breath and held it, imagining the fleet of X-wings behind her bursting into the coming firefight the way a child cliff-jumps into a lake. A sudden slowness overtaking everything, and with one wrong move water could fill the lungs until they spilled over into the afterlife. 

The breath never stayed held on the other side, not when there were orders to give and confirm--but when they dropped just inside the orbit of Belgaroth’s farthest moon, her hands jerked to the right before she could register why, shouting right into the comms while the screech of a TIE fighter grew and faded.

_Okay, okay, you didn’t crash into it, good--call the formation--_

It wouldn’t matter. Blue Team had given up on any formal strategy, as had the First Order squadron: a swarming cloud of ships and flames spun around itself with no clear core and already members of her crew had swooped in to take out enemy ships that were trailing Blue Team ships and raining them with green blaster fire.

“Hold on, BB-8,” she muttered.

Above, she spotted two TIE fighters coming it at opposite angles to ambush the X-wing chasing after its target, a higher-model fighter whose engine curved into crescents. She slammed into the back of her seat at her ship rocketed upwards taking out one before they bothered to look down.

“Blue 5, you got another one on your back,” she said.

“Wonderful,” Bastian’s voice said in her ear. “Just my lucky _day_ \--” The last word came out a grunt as he tipped his ship vertical to avoid a couple more shots from the fighter behind him.

“It will be if you give me a sec--”

The TIE fighter between them twitched to the left and fell dead-center in her scope; a couple squeezes on the trigger and she was flying through flaming debris, BB-8 trilling what had to be some sort of shout. As she was turning her X-wing back toward the rest of the battle, she saw Bastian take out his target.

“Nice shot.”

Bastian snorted. “Thanks, Black Leader,” he said, for once with an air of sincerity.

His ship sped off to a cluster of TIEs that had ganged up on some other members of the squadron--the long wings of the Resistance ships always edged past the outlines of their more compact counterparts. They could never hide in the same way. And she wanted to shoot them down from a distance but the risk was too much; Iolo swerved down closer, downed the TIEs that were near the younger pilots, let them take care of the rest.

“Black Leader, this is Blue Leader--you have mighty good timing.”

“Catch me up to speed, Snap.”

“Okay.” He sighed into his microphone, devoid of any bit of mirth he had been projecting. “Blue Six is down. They had enough TIEs to keep us at a stalemate, but Black Team should help us get rid of them.”

“What’s keeping us from hopping on that hyperspace lane the General told us about?” she asked. She fired a couple shots at the fighter that was chasing Karé, throwing it off course enough for someone else to blow it to pieces. “We lost Blue Six--we can’t lose anyone else.”

“She got that lane from her investigations into Rinnrivin Di when she was a senator. He worked with the founders of the First Order,” he said pointedly.

“Kriff, they’d be able to follow us, wouldn’t they?”

“Yep, that’s what I’m afraid of.”

“Pfassk.”

A couple more TIE fighters disintegrated into ashes in her peripheral vision, as did an X-wing. Black Five, Tharan. He was so young--

“We gotta take care of them before we go, Pava,” Snap said.

“Copy that,” she sighed.

 _Someone’s behind us!_ BB-8 squealed right as Snap flew off to take out a TIE careening toward Iolo.

She swore, ducked the nose of the X-wing down at the steepest angle it could manage and still it dove after her without a moment’s hesitation, spraying blaster fire and whittling away at her shields--

“Persistent little asshole,” she said, twisting the ship back up, flying in a corkscrew pattern until the stars in the background were pulled into halos of light. BB-8 screamed one long, shrill note. “I’m sorry, BB-8, would you have rather gotten shot down?”

_You warned me before!_

“I was a little busier this time--okay--” She was cut off by the fighter behind her exploding and as her ship leveled out of the corkscrew, it shook and clanged against the flying debris.

“Returning the favor, Black Leader,” Bastian said over the comms.

Circling the rest of the battle, Jessika chewed at the inside of her cheek. Tharan and the Blue Six were the only ones they’d lost so far, and even with First Order ships dropping left and right, they were still locked in a stalemate--the numbers simply did not make sense. “BB-8,” she said, picking off a TIE fighter that had started shooting at Nien Nunb. “Can you see if they’ve been getting reinforcements this whole time?”

They beeped and started to scan the field while her eyes were drawn to the rocky moon off in the distance--Tregan or Tyrel, she couldn’t remember which one was the farthest, and sure enough after a couple tense moments, she spotted two TIE fighters circle around from its far side, blasters already blazing.

 _Look, you were right!_ BB-8 beeped.

“Kriffing hell, they’re just going to wear us down if we don’t take care of that--Blue Leader, come in, we’ve got a situation--”

“Copy, Black Leader, what--”

She was already swinging her ship around toward the moon, keeping under the plane of its orbit to try to stay out of the newer fighters’ line of sight. “They’ve kriffing set up a kriffing base of rein-kriffing-forcements on that moon to fight us in some war of _kriffing attrition_ \--”

“Pava--wait, you’re not flying there, are you?”

“No, Snap, I just wanted to tell you so we’d know why we were dying when the time came--”

“Let me at least come with you--”

“No,” she said. “No. The rest of the squadron still needs leadership here.”

“Fine,” he sighed, and she heard the distinct click of buttons as he pulled in another line on their connection. “Black Two, follow Black Leader and make sure she doesn’t do anything too reckless.”

Jessika had no ready-made excuse for that, though she did grumble under her breath as Karé copied. It was bad enough that they were going to be one ship down while she went to investigate, but two would push it. Two could mean pulling around the other side of the moon after they took care of the reinforcements to find nothing but an ash cloud in a blank bit of space. The Resistance had some of the best pilots around, but they weren’t droids. They would still get tired. And slip. And look down to see the engine status panel lit up in blood orange before half the wings crumbled off in flames.

“So, Pava, you got a plan or what?” Karé’s ship had pulled up beside hers, close enough for Jessika to see the halfway-to-peeved set of her mouth. “I’d suggest strafing them but we don’t know how many they have.”

“Working on it. Trying not to get spotted is taking up most of my energy right now.”

They flew in silence for a few minutes, the arc of the moon slowly taking up more and more of her field of vision. The air fight was hardly audible behind them at this distance, save for the whine of TIE fighters deployed to replace their fallen comrades. The reality of what they were about to do set in with a heavy clunk right in the pit of her stomach.

 _I know we have to do this,_ BB-8 squeaked, _but didn’t Friend Rey tell us to be safe?_

“Yeah,” Jessika said. “So we’re going to do this _safely_. Somehow.”

“Hey,” Karé said over the comms. “I think I see a ridge near where they’re coming from. There’s some high rocks along there where we can land unseen.”

“Lead the way.”

As they broke through the atmosphere and approached the moon’s surface, Jessika wondered if it could possibly strip Togoria 1 of its place as the bleakest moon in the galaxy. The terrain was covered in nothing but dull gray rocks: gray rocks in piles, gray rocks in warped wind-eroded formations, gray rocks carelessly strewn about in the few flat tracts of land she could spot. Parts of it almost reminded her of construction sites on Corulag, the piles of duracrete of a demolished building before it got hauled away.

Where Karé brought them was barely large enough to fit their two ships; if Jessika had moved even an inch more to the left, she would have started to scrape plating off Karé’s wing. Jumping down from the cockpit, she ducked around until she came to the edge of the rock wall separating them from the First Order center of operations, her sweaty hairline quickly chilling in the light breeze.

“Oh man, thin air. My favorite,” she muttered. “You think they saw us?”

Karé craned her neck to scope out the height of the wall and the rest of their surroundings. “Nah, we would’ve known by now.” She ran a hand through her hair and the sweat made it stick up in short, blonde spikes. “This place almost reminds me of that mission where Poe ran into those people with the egg--”

“What, another straightforward mission blowing up in our faces?” In the distance another TIE fighter took off, rising above the top of the rock face and racing away from them up over the sparse clouds.

“I was mainly talking about the rocks, but that too. Okay,” she sighed, pointing at where the fighter had appeared. “So they’re close. And we need to find a way to ground however many they have over there.”

“And not die in the meantime. Got it.” She saw Karé roll her eyes but she put that and the entire concept of mortality at the back of her head. If she thought too much about how easy it was to take a body and make it incapable of sustaining life, her thoughts would stray to Rey; and if they strayed to Rey, there would be no way for her to be logical about the mess they were in. “Look…” She nodded over to the far side of the wall where it sloped steeply downward with a couple crumbling boulders. “I don’t see any other way around this thing.”

“Good,” Karé said. “But for grounding them… I can disable a TIE fighter but it takes me a good ten minutes each--”

“Which we don’t have.”

“Exactly. So…” She tapped a finger against her chin. “We could blow them up, right?”

Jessika frowned, nodded. The plan had merit--not only could it be a dramatic middle finger to the whole First Order, but it would also accomplish what they set out to do. Usually her best ideas only managed one. “We have the crash ration kit and the spare tanks of fuel to makes some old-fashioned bombs, but a blaster isn’t going to to be useful to set those on fire.”

Karé ran a hand over her face and bit at her bottom lip, tapped her hand arrythmically against her knee--the pressure was palpable, as if the thin air was sucking away at the atmosphere of the other moon until it crowded them out. Back towards Jessika’s ship, she heard the clang of BB-8 descending from the astromech pod, almost too loudly, and she turned to find them rolling over the crunchy gravel to bump against her calf.

“Hey, what’s up? What do you need?”

BB-8 pulled back, wiggling as they beeped. _Friend Karé has a good idea! And I can help!_ At that, one of their panels opened to reveal a metal extension with a tiny purple flame at the end.

“Y’know,” Karé said slowly, “I don’t think that’s a standard feature on BB units.”

“We can corner Poe about it later. C’mon.”

They each pulled their ship’s crash ration kits from the back of the cockpit--they were loaded with vials of bacta and bottled water, rolls of bandages and jugs of painkillers. As much as it pained them to dump the material, fretting over it would only keep the rest of the squadron in danger longer. They soaked the bandages in the X-wing fuel and stuffed them in all the bottles they deemed large enough to work, pouring extra fuel into the sides.

“Where did you learn to do this?” Jessika asked.

“I had some family on Onderon,” she said. “Fought with Saw Gerrera way back in the day, or so they claimed. Even when they moved in with us on Coruscant, they were still a touch paranoid.” She shrugged as if a brief explanation would make this part of her childhood normal. “I’ll have to thank them, I guess.” She set the bomb she’d been working on next to the others with an extra level of care, sighing when she turned back to the ripped pile of bandages. “You really think this is going to work?”

“Doesn’t do much good to second guess ourselves now, Karé,” she said. “But hold on.” She ran over to the sloped edge of the wall, pulled herself up the rocks to peek over the side. The flat expanse of rock was larger than their plot of it, and an additional twenty TIE fighters sat with their engines stalled, a few stormtrooper officers with red plating on one shoulder giving the orders to send them off.

Twenty was a lot--not an insurmountable number, but enough to ensure that Tharan and Blue Six wouldn’t be the only ones not to make it to Selvaris.

She scrambled back to Karé and started pulling their homemade bombs into her arms. “Well, it’s not going to be easy.”

“Wait, you think we’re just going to climb over the ledge with BB-8 in one arm and just start throwing?”

“Do you have a better idea?”

Karé grabbed her flight suit sleeve and pulled her back down. “If this goes south, we could die. They could send the rest of their reserves out at once, and everyone else out there could die.”

“Yeah, I _know_ ,” she hissed. “And again: do you have a better idea?”

From the way Karé frowned, it was more than evident that she didn’t--but now wasn’t the time to rub in the _that’s what I thought_. “There’s still a better way to do this.” She stood up, ran another hand through her hair, and started stripping off her flight suit. “For one, if we’re not going to have much cover, it’s not the best idea to be wearing radioactive orange.”

Jessika had jumped to her feet and was halfway through fighting the various straps and buckles by the time Karé stepped out of her suit, the olive-green undershirt and leggings sticking to her shades darker than they were supposed to be. “Furthermore…” she said, climbing up to her cockpit. Her hand was wrapped around a rolled-up burlap bag when she hopped back down. “Efficiency is going to help us here. You get BB-8 over the ledge and I’ll carry the ammo.”

Jessika gave her a thumbs up as she continued to fight with the suit’s belt--somehow it had gotten twisted around in her hurry to pull it on that morning, tangling in the stray straps on the flak vest. And of course this would be going wrong as well, getting trapped in the neon coveralls, all while someone she was supposed to have under her command was able to be more levelheaded. “Kriff, why hasn’t the General made you a squadron leader yet?”

Karé paused, looking up from their pile of bombs. “I don’t really want to be, honestly. We have better pilots than me, anyway. You, for example. What?” she added when Jessika snorted. “It’s true.”

“Okay.” Finally she was able to untangle herself, tossing the suit and flak vest into a crumpled heap by the ladder to her cockpit. “But there’s more to being a squadron leader than just flying.”

“Exactly.” Karé hoisted the bag over her shoulder slowly, wincing as the jars clinked against each other. “I wasn’t the one who noticed the extra TIEs coming from this hunk of rock.” She jerked her head back toward the sloped ledge before Jessika had time to argue, much less grab her blaster and BB-8 to catch up.

As another TIE fighter took off, they quickly ducked back down; even with the brief glance at the scene, Jessika could tell not much had changed. The officers had moved to higher posts, hastily-constructed scaffolding platforms just high enough to overlook the sea of ships before them. That provided a slight tactical issue--as soon as their attack started, those stormtroopers would be in an easy position to pick them off before too much damage had been done.

Karé looked between the scaffolding towers and the bag of ammo with a question in her eyes, and Jessika pulled her blaster from the back of her pants. “You’re a good shot,” she mouthed. “I throw a couple of these and you shoot them once they detonate.”

Karé nodded and took the blaster, motioning for them to switch positions; she’d already laid out three bombs from the sack, and BB-8 stared up at Jessika expectantly with their big blank eye. She wondered if they had any idea how ridiculous of a plan this was or if their programming had any hand in pushing them to trust in her and Karé.

“Get ready.” She held up the ends of the three bombs to BB-8’s lighter, whipped back around as soon as she could see the fire had caught hold--aim for the middle of them, that was what she’d worked out, send the stormtroopers scrambling to find what direction it could have come from. One, two, three: they soared through the air in a thick silence, Karé tensing beside her with her finger on the trigger.

A light crack of glass shattering--sharp blaster fire--and three raging mushroom clouds of orange along the center four TIEs. Stormtrooper officers draping lifeless over railings with burn marks at the center of their helmets, the TIEs at the edge of the field rocking from the blast, daring themselves to tip over.

Jessika turned beside her to find Karé holding up another five to BB-8 and she followed suit.

And again. And again. Pausing to grab the blaster and take out a TIE pilot who’d decided to be more ambitious than was smart. The air blowing past them was dense and hot like an oven, stinking of sulfur and the distinctive metallic burn of the material that lined the ion engines.

“Hey--” Karé said suddenly, her hand grabbing Jessika’s arm as it reached into the bag for another bomb. “That’s it. We’re done.”

It had almost felt too quick to be true, but the expanse of rock before them was shrouded by thick smoke, charred and broken pieces of TIEs peeking through where it thinned. Beyond that, there was a crackle of a fire still burning. “I’ll admit it,” she said, blinking sweat from her eyes. “Efficiency is nice.”

BB-8 squeaked in celebration as Karé picked them up to head back to their X-wings. They needed to radio Snap--Jessika’s hands were already shaking from the attack, but they showed no signs of stopping as she followed the path of her thoughts to terrible scenario after terrible scenario, radioing into a void because their victory had come too late. ( _That kriffing flight suit--_ )

She climbed into her cockpit, Karé following her up the ladder, leaning against the outside edge of it with an air of calm that she couldn’t have possibly been feeling, because surely she was nervous too. She had to have been.

Jessika tried to control her breathing as the comms fuzzed to life. “Come in Blue Leader--this is Black Leader and Black Two. Enemy reinforcements on the moon--”

“Tyrel,” Karé added.

“--on Tyrel have been eliminated. Please provide status report.”

They waited for the static to shift into Snap’s voice. Any voice. And the longer they waited, the more Jessika felt her throat start to close up.

After thirty seconds, she attempted to clear the blockage. Coughed. Took a deep breath. Spotted Karé in the corner of her eye biting at her bottom lip. “I repeat: Blue Leader, please provide status report.”

The static was starting to mock them.

“This isn’t really happening, is it?” Karé muttered to herself. “No, can’t be--”

“Copy Black Leader, Black Two,” Snap’s voice crackled. “Sorry for the delay, some of our comms got hit with some electrical trouble. But we’re all right.”

Any other time, Jessika would have let him have a stream of curses strong enough to peel the paint off his helmet for scaring them like that, but relief that washed over her put out the fire. “What does ‘all right’ mean, exactly?”

“First-Order-free and no additional casualties.”

At the foot of the ladder BB-8 trilled happily, rolling in circles, and Jessika was half ready to join them on the ground. “Kriffing thank _stars_ ,” she said.

“I’ve already messaged Red and Gold Teams with the update,” he said. “Now get back up here, you two--we’re not jumping to Selvaris without you.”

The smile in his voice was contagious as he signed off, lasting as Jessika pulled her flight suit back on, secured her hair under her helmet, checked all the gauges on the dashboard. She could sense it falling away with the surface of Tyrel as they took off--she was going to make it to Selvaris. They all were.

 _Just like I promised._ Just like Rey had promised, Rey and Finn and Poe and everyone else on the other side of the Core--but there was no way to know now if they were going to uphold their end of the bargain.

The rest of the squadron lauded their efforts when she and Karé regrouped, whooping and cheering over the comms, and she was glad that they couldn’t see into her cockpit and how she had already nervously bit at her finger so badly that it had started to bleed.

* * *

 

“If I just wanted to kill you, I would’ve done it by now.” 

Finn had reached for his hand again and with more than just his little finger--he squeezed so tightly Poe could feel his smaller knuckle bones sliding against each other, but it didn’t hurt. No, the pain, if it could have been called that, was hovering above the hollow of his throat, a straight line up from the usual suspect, that spot in his breastbone. Kylo Ren’s presence within the Force was a stiff boot heel searching for the tenderest of spots to leave its tread.

Poe’s chest had practice--his throat had never even approached an afterthought.

“Finn,” Rey whispered. “You’re hurting my hand--”

“Sorry--”

“No, no, we just--”

“We should go,” Poe said.

They glanced at him, a grim set to their faces that clashed with their youth. Rey swallowed, wincing slightly; she could feel it too, the boot.

When they descended the ramp, Ren stood a few yards off, one of the crumbling old Imperial storage buildings as his backdrop; at one point it might have been a paler gray stone, but the elements had caked it in grime, forced impurities into its makeup until it became a mottled, unstable black. It swallowed up most of Ren’s frame, left him as just floating pale face with a gruesome scar if you didn’t look closely enough.

“You’re the three that got away,” he said. He tilted his lightsaber point-first toward the ground as if he were going to lean on it like a cane, pausing right before it hit the dirt. A gust of wind blew from the nearby trees and the dust sizzled against the saber.

Beside him, Finn tensed.

“A shame, really, but it’s not something that can’t be corrected.” Ren turned to Poe, saber-less hand outstretched and fingers beckoning.

The Force pulled the connection between them taut and every time Ren’s finger twitched, there was a tug against some part of him: his ribs, his ankles, the little bones in his ears that rang high and off-key in his head. And he couldn’t push it out because that was the power of the Force, wasn’t it, connecting all living things, no matter the lines drawn. What was an alliance or a war to the underlying glue to existence?

It still made his stomach churn, his paltry breakfast trying to crawl back up his throat.

“I know Rey is likely a lost cause,” Ren said, “but you still have so much potential in the Dark Side… you could write your own chapter in a history stretching back to the mighty Sith Empire--”

He kept talking, that Poe knew. He could hear the dramatic rhythm his speech had taken, the rehearsed feel that it had, but the individual words fell away, leaving the percussion of it all behind in the memory overtaking him. Sith--vague legends from the end of the Old Republic in the Academy’s history classes, a Zabrak infiltrating the royal palace on Naboo; but more than that, the warm grip of his mother’s arms, his legs wrapped around her hips, tales of the Massassi rising into the thick air of sunset with the calls of the whisper birds.

Millennia ago, the Massassi had watched outsiders stride among their temples and take them, their bodies for their own. Always a new set of boots, no matter the year. Ren was offering him the set that pressed against his neck now, but the shadows of the temples on Yavin 4 stretched longer than Ren knew.

“I’m not like you,” he said.

The corner of Ren’s mouth twitched up in a brief grin. “That’s what they told you, wasn’t it? You don’t believe them, not completely.”

Poe ground his teeth but refused to let his fists clench or anything else about himself shift: he could control this, he knew he could control this, and Ren couldn’t know that he’d stepped a little too close to the truth.

More importantly, neither could Finn or Rey.

“You were more mouthy before--is something wrong?” Ren took a step closer, eyeing Finn and Rey as they fought against a flinch and kept their ground. “I’ve told you before, Commander Dameron, I can feel what you’re feeling. All that anger and fear… all that hate you have for me.”

It was growing again. Where they had landed on Ord Mirit was closer to the poles, nearing chilly when the sun fell behind the clouds, but there was sweat collecting at Poe’s temples and the thin skin at the center of his chest was burning and Ren was right: he was angry and he hated him and every part of it throbbed.

(But Ren was wrong, too, because Finn and Rey were still standing beside him. Because they said he was nothing like Ren.)

Across the empty space between them, Poe sensed the deep vat of Ren’s own anger--the barrier that kept it in check was tenuous at best and it seethed against that shield until the whole thing bubbled outwards, groaning under the weight. There was anger on their own side of the aisle, too. The high lines of an even temper under Rey’s finger, or the single echoing thud as it landed in Finn’s gut.

“Here.” Ren reached into his robe and pulled out a lightsaber with dark scorch marks along the hilt. “You forgot this.”

“I don’t want it.”

“Part of you does,” Ren said and before he could take two steps forward, Finn put himself between them, blaster aimed at the center of Ren’s forehead. “FN-2187--”

“Try again.”

“Captain Phasma told me you had a lot of potential,” he said. “ _Had_.” A pause--“Now _move_.”

Finn only reset his shoulders and double checked the aim of his blaster--and this one time, Poe wanted him to listen. He saw through the back of his jacket, through the questionable repair job, all the way to the strip of the scar along his back; and he could play forward one rendition of events, slowly following the arc of Ren’s arm as he slices a mirror of that scar across Finn’s chest. A mirror, but deeper.

Finn’s finger wouldn’t be halfway to the trigger by the time his knees crumpled.

“You were wrong about me,” Finn said. “About my role in the First Order. And you’re wrong about Poe.”

Poe could see Ren’s face over Finn’s shoulder--he cocked his head, the thick black hair falling into his eyes as his stare grew more curious. “Maybe not as wrong as you think.”

His chest blazed white-hot now--the mere _implication_ \--

“Take the lightsaber, Dameron,” Ren spat, and he held it closer to eye level so he could see it, so he could reach for it through the Force and have it smack against his palm--

But then Finn was beside him, his hand pulling at his elbow, and his feet tumbled over themselves to find purchase in the ground that had started moving beneath them. Dirt clouds billowed up with each step, gritting up his eyes and mouth and he expected Finn to slow down once they ducked further into the maze of buildings--but the grip on his elbow didn’t relent.

“Finn. _Finn--_ what’s are you doing? Where’s--”

In the gap between two structures, he spotted the entrance to the Falcon framed on one side by a fritzing beam of red and two whirling lines of green and blue on the other. Finn was moving too fast for him to get a better look.

“Rey, she--” Finn gasped. “She did the Force grab thing with the lightsaber.”

“What?”

“Kylo wasn’t exactly _looking_ over where she was--” He rounded the corner and came to an abrupt stop against the wall where a thick braid of vines had woven their way into the duracrete. Reaching to the back of his pants, he pulled out Poe’s blaster and pushed it into his arms. “Here. Just gonna catch our breath and figure out a plan…”

The wind blew another wave of dirt down the path. His breathing echoed too loudly in his ears and in the crests of it, the pauses where there was half a second of silence, the electric hum of the lightsabers crackled. If he looked down, he would have expected to see the hair on his arm standing on end.

But then he remembered--

“Why the hell did you put yourself between him and me?” Poe said. “You could’ve--”

Finn glanced up from checking his blaster but his face didn’t react. “Died? You could have too. I…” High pitched pops rang back from the Falcon, two lone birds scattering to the sky, and Finn stepped closer. “Kylo’s not alone, and if we’re going to get out of here, we need to take care of them--”

“How do you--”

“I just do, okay? I just do.” Finn’s eyes crawled all over Poe’s face, the resolute set of his brow weakening as they found themselves flung closer and closer to stepping back out into the thick of it all, crossing a line when the other side lay dark. “They’re coming. We gotta move. Are you okay?”

Finn’s dark eyes wobbled with fear but it didn’t reach lower than that. Lower, where his ribs curved over his lungs, Poe noticed a tug from _that spot_ at his breastbone, how a thick thread closed the gap and wound into a knot around something sturdy. Tight like the strings of his father’s dusty mandoviol in the closet, and warm all the way to his toes.

“Y-yeah, yeah,” Poe said, getting a better handle on his blaster. “I’m okay.”

“Good. Good,” Finn said, mostly to himself. “Let’s go.”

The wings of Ren’s shuttle had folded themselves up to a point above the cabin, the tips barely visible over the lines of duracrete roofs; Finn jerked his head in that direction and they were off jogging through the paths, half-jumping over vines that had crept along the dirt in search of another wall to scale. And Finn squeezed his hand when he nearly tripped--because he was holding his hand, which he hadn’t noticed. It was a centering force.

(When he squeezed back, it was as if his fingers had wrapped around his heart until it was set to burst--)

“Over there--”

Three stormtroopers raised and fired their blasters by the time Poe had registered their presence around the corner--he ducked, shots grazing his sleeves, whizzing past his ear as he and Finn jumped behind a rotting wooden fence. It was held up by little more than the creeping vines and the will of the Force itself; the bottom half of a plank peeled off the frame with a nudge from the end of Poe’s finger, leaving a mesh of ivy for cover. He laid on his stomach and stuck the tip of his blaster through the growth to carve out enough space to see.

One stormtrooper already laid in a heap on the ground, turned on their side with the helmet’s blank scowl staring back at him. A scorch mark sat square in the center of the forehead. Finn’s doing. He peered through the scope for the other two--or any more that might not have disembarked the shuttle--and he held his breath.

A small rodent scampered around the landing gear--he jumped, back heaving up into the palm of Finn’s hand, and was pressed back down, deep into the dirt, Finn’s body weight fully splayed across his ribcage. There had been blaster fire but whose blaster fire, was he--they couldn’t have aimed that well--

The pressure lifted and Poe rolled over, found Finn sitting back on his heels with dirt caking into his dimples. “Sorry,” he gasped. “It’s just…” He pointed along to the end of the fence on Poe’s other side where it opened up to the field--another stormtrooper down.

“Don’t be sorry,” Poe said. “Gods, I thought you were dead for a second--”

A glare caught in his eye over the fence top, dead-white and blinding--Poe sat up, grabbed the back of Finn’s head and pulled him down on top of him, firing his blaster as he squinted. When his eyes readjusted, the stormtrooper was slumped over the fence, blaster drooping from their limp fingers as the decaying wood groaned under the weight.

Finn’s head was tucked into Poe’s shoulder, panting through the adrenaline, hot breath against his neck. Alive. They were both alive, and the three twanging strands of the Force he had been able to recognize from the stormtroopers had been cut loose.

“That was all of them,” Finn said. His voice hummed under Poe’s jawline. “We need to--”

“Get to Rey,” he said. “I know.”

Finn sat back and jumped to his feet. Offered Poe a hand that he didn’t drop once they were both standing.

(All of the worst parts of the Force simmered low when he held Finn’s hand. Like he was back to his old self, or as close as he was going to come to it.)

The sound of Ren and Rey’s fight had swung wide in an arc around the collection of buildings, shifting closer to the First Order shuttle, and they set off at a run towards them. Armed with nothing but their blasters as if that was going to tilt the odds any more in their favor but it wouldn’t hurt, it couldn’t, and they’d already left her without backup long enough.

Finn pulled them around a corner, and down the straightaway the back of Ren’s black robes was trapped in a whirl of red and green and blue--Rey was advancing on him, teeth bared, and he could hardly back up fast enough. The Force energy pulsing between them was spiteful, heavy with the memory of their last encounter.

“I can take the shot,” Finn gasped as they continued to run. “Get him down so we can end this and bring him in--”

“No, it’s too far!” They were nearly two grav-ball fields down from them, never staying in one spot long enough to have any sort of reliable aim. “The sabers could reflect the shot back at us! Worse, you could hit Rey--”

And maybe it was because she heard her name, but Rey noticed them beyond the dark frame of Ren before her and the moment of broken concentration was enough of a window for Ren to kick up against one of her hands--the green lightsaber flew into the air, resheathing itself as it tumbled into the barren plot of dirt far over his shoulder.

Rey shouted, charged further with both hands on the hilt of her remaining saber--her hold on the Force vibrated more boldly, rushing down against Poe’s feet--

“Get the lightsaber!” Finn said to him suddenly.

“What? No--”

“Before Kylo gets it! Use the Force grabby thing--”

“I told you,” Poe said. “I don’t--I can’t do lightsabers, I just can’t!”

( _This cannot be Mustafar_.)

“What do you mean you _can’t_?”

( _This will not be Mustafar_.)

“I--it’s--” The words weren’t coming and Finn was waiting, desperate and confused and wanting to help. “It’s too close to--”

“Close to _what?_ ” Finn’s hand that wasn’t still latched to his flung wide and dramatic; and there was a whizzing sound that Poe tried to pin down, that could only be identified when they both turned to that hand and saw the lightsaber there. “Um.”

That knot Poe had sensed between them doubled on itself, glowing at the center and flushing all the way back to his own chest until he could hardly stand it.

“Did you do this?” Finn said. He had come to a stop. Stared at the lightsaber under his fingers, then up at Poe.

“How--why would I?”

Finn turned back toward Ren and Rey--they were locked together with their sabers grinding into each other, growling with the effort. His thoughts played out on his face, the gears whirring loudly enough that the hiss of it was almost audible over the rest of the noise--when he glanced back at Poe, he’d gone stern, fingers wrapping more firmly around the hilt. “Okay,” he said. Nodded. His thumb clicked the switch, turned the dirt under his feet and stuck to his face green in the aura.

 _Go, go--_ Poe urged him silently. But Finn wouldn’t. He wouldn’t go, staring back at Poe instead like he was asking him, _are you sure?_ Poe could hear his voice as a whisper in his head, humming through the thread connecting them. What he couldn’t make sense of was what Finn meant: sure of what? That he didn’t want the lightsaber? That this would be enough to disarm Ren so they could escape?

It pushed back into his head again, _are you sure_ , and it could never matter what the specifics were--maybe there weren’t any, or maybe the specific was just standing there before him with terrified eyes hidden behind a subtle flash of courage.

_Are you sure about me?_

Poe had been sure about Finn since the moment he pulled his helmet off on the Finalizer.

“Finn, _go_ ,” he said. “I’ll get the Falcon ready to take off.”

He watched him set off at a sprint right as Rey pushed back against Ren, advancing. They met somewhere in the middle with one slice of red fending off twice the attacks coming at it from different angles, weaving in a circular pattern and kicking up dust. The Falcon lay just beyond them with its undamaged engine and radio; if he could slip past the duel in one piece, they had a solid chance of making it to Selvaris without a tail. Without having to tally up any casualties.

If--that was always the most important word in the plan.

Poe moved close to the structures lining the clearing, pausing every so often to gauge the path of Ren’s feet as he fought against the onslaught. He looked for Finn’s eyes--the terror hadn’t left them, just as the focus of them hadn’t strayed from the frenzied charge of Ren’s lightsaber. But the reflection of that terror was not the brightest piece of the scene: it was the reflection from Rey’s teeth, the spark of two blades on first contact.

A few more feet and he would be in the clear to make a break for the ramp up to the ship--

Finn shouted as he flew through the air at the end of Ren’s hand, rolling into the trunk of a tree; his lightsaber flew into Ren’s hand as Rey pushed forward even harder--

 _You still have your blaster!_ \--his own voice or Finn’s, he didn’t have time to tell which it was; he fired two quick shots into Ren’s elbow and the green saber’s hilt fell across the blade of Rey’s as it swung up to block a blow to her face.

Beyond them, Finn was scrambling to his feet, jumping up to grab a tree branch that was already halfway to snapping. The low cracks as it started to pull loose echoed off a surface years behind him--

( _“Poe, sweetheart, if you climb up much further, you’re going to fall_ \-- _”_ )

Rey’s heel connected with Ren’s knee. Another crack, a different crack: accompanied by a cry of pain as he fell to his knees, leaning on the one that had escaped unscathed and letting the hand gripping his angry red saber fall open.

It tumbled to Poe’s foot, scalding hot against his toes even through the thick leather; and as soon as he looked up, Ren had already forced the remaining blue saber from Rey’s hand, slamming it into the duracrete wall over Poe’s shoulder.

“You won’t win this, Rey,” Ren said. “None of you will. Not when--” There was a loud snap and then his face was flat in the dirt.

“Do you ever shut up?” said Rey, the tree branch Finn had broken off secure in her grip. A few of the leaves on thinner shoots at the end rustled, settling into silence after the blow.

 _The lightsabers_. Both Rey’s and Ren’s had rolled to a stop before him, beckoning. He tucked his blaster in the back of his pants and reached for them--not to arm himself, never, but just to keep them from rocketing back into Ren’s hands once he pushed himself back off the ground.

In his own hands, against his own palms, something was warring and pricked at his skin. Blasting full and open as the sabers landed there and switched themselves on.

The heat reached up from Poe’s chest, all the way up his throat until the back of his tongue was warm.

And Ren smiled. Wide and toothy near the ground as Rey’s branch dug into his cheek to keep him down. “It’s strong in you, Dameron,” he said. “They can tell. Especially mine.” He eyed the length of the red blade, the heavier of the two. “Who else knows about the Dark Side in you?”

Rey pushed the branch harder into his face, but he barely budged. Beyond them, Finn hadn’t moved from the tree, and Poe realized that he was the only one left among them armed. He stepped closer to Ren until the ends of the lightsabers were a few inches from where Ren laid.

“Just these two here?” Ren continued. “Not any of the other officers under your command? You’re close with Wexley, aren’t you? Did he ever tell you about his father--”

“ _Enough_ ,” Poe said, and a crackle wrapped up around Ren’s lightsaber, blipping away at the tip. The longer Ren leered at him like this, the further the anger was spreading: down to the ends of his toes and his fingers and the shells of his ears, and when it didn’t have anywhere else to go, it crept outwards. Just like Mustafar. Only here, the heat of the fire couldn’t mask it from him. “What do you _want_? Why is this so important to you?”

His voice was cracking, Rey and Finn’s eyes heavy on his skin. He couldn’t look back at them, either of them--in his head, he kept seeing Drem’s petrified face frozen at the other end of Poe’s fingers, a physical wave of the hatred that had enveloped him as he had dueled Ren over the writhing fire. If he didn’t meet their gazes, then it all could live and die with him. The eyes could reveal so much, couldn’t they--

( _“I knew Pa was a good man the moment I caught his glance across the briefing room,” his mother said, and his father laughed from the stove. “Those big brown eyes told me to trust him.”_

 _“What do mine say?” Poe asked. His little feet pushed up on the seat of his chair, knees knocking against the edge of the table. Level with his mother, he held his eyelids open with his fingers, waiting for an answer even as she laughed into her caf._ )

“It isn’t what _I_ want,” Ren said. He reached into his robes and pulled out a portable holoprojector, keeping an eye half on Rey the entire time. His thumb hit the switch as he tossed it off to his other side, and the flickering image was a being like nothing Poe had ever seen.

“Another rebellion with a Dameron at the helm,” the projection said, keeping his mouth in a tight O around each syllable--as not to stretch the visible tendons in his face too far, Poe noticed in horror. “Predictable.”

Although the projection was only a few feet tall, the aura the projection held gave the impression of something much larger than the equipment could portray. The figure could tell he had that effect: what was left of his chin was held high and his sullen glare pushed back at Poe, urging him to put more distance between them.

“Supreme Leader Snoke trained me,” Ren said. “He showed me the ways of the Dark Side when my uncle refused to teach me the Force in all its complexities. And now--”

“And now,” Snoke said pointedly, “it’s time for our next steps.” The breath he took rumbled with the power of something much larger than the holoprojector could display, sinking right into the hollow space around Poe’s lungs.

“I sensed you. I sensed you all before you came into awareness of your abilities.” Snoke made eye contact with the four of them--Rey jerking back an inch, Finn’s frown deepening along every part of his face. “But it is one thing to be strong in the Force by blood; it is another…” And here his beady sunken eyes panned over every inch of Poe’s body. “It is another to gain the power from an outside source.

“Poe Dameron, I first felt you twenty-four standard years ago,” he continued. “I was in hiding at the poles of Maridun, then--when I felt a surge of _something_ from one of the moons orbiting Yavin. Anger barbed with a deep sense of loss.”

Twenty-four years ago. The death of his mother. Waking up to find a freshly-made bed in the master bedroom and the door to the guestroom locked even when the keyhole was at the perfect height to peep through and see what they were hiding. (The plain white sheet tented over a familiar profile.) The funeral pyre burning the next day. Luke and the General (Senator then, _Senator_ ) taking off the next morning and his father burning the fried plantains and the next day--Poe unable to talk, throat scraped raw from the outburst, how it kept coming out of him and never seemed to end.

Until it did.

The wind had caught in the leaves of the Force tree hard that night, rustling louder than the rest of the jungle around them while his father let him sleep in the big bed.

“Your anger has served you well, even if you haven’t recognized it.”

“When I’m angry,” Poe said slowly, “is when I have the most trouble focusing. That’s not serving me well.”

“You told others that you joined the New Republic air fleet in part to honor your mother’s memory, but you and I both know your decision to defect to the _Resistance_ ”--the loathing in his voice coated the word thickly--“was born of a secret yearning to avenge her and the latent war wound that brought about her untimely demise.”

“That’s not true,” Poe said, looking over at Finn like he was addressing him directly.

“Her--and Muran, too,” Snoke said. “I almost forgot.”

“It was more than that. It was always more than that.” His hands were shaking slightly, the lightsabers wobbling with them with their low hum, and then they were steady. Warmth pressed against the sensitive skin at the insides of his wrists; by the trees, Finn’s brow softened.

“You hated the Empire, just as you hate the First Order,” said Snoke.

“Can you blame me? Can you blame any of us?”

“You, I can blame.” Snoke’s translucent hand gestured lazily at the rest of them there. “They have their reasons. You--why do you fight for the New Republic? Useless ever since Mon Mothma stepped down, the disorder and the squabbling factions… turning their back on your precious Princess Leia… they can’t be what your mother was fighting for--”

“You don’t--how do you know so much about my family--”

“The New Republic failed you!” Snoke shouted, and even Ren winced at the outburst. “Shouldn’t they have examined your mother’s injury better? Shouldn’t they have helped prevent that from happening to you? It was because of them she was even hurt in the first place.”

But the New Republic was what she had been fighting for. What she and his father had both been fighting for. They’d grown up on tales of the Old Republic, the voluminous hollow orb that housed the old Senate chambers, the towering hall of the Jedi that loomed over its sector of Coruscant. And they wanted it back: for themselves, for their parents, and for him, too. Him, mostly. The toddler squeezing his grandfather’s finger on Yavin 4 while the war waged on elsewhere with them in the thick of it.

They believed in the cause, fought for it. Put their lives on the line for it and killed in its name--because they were _angry_.

“You can join me, Poe Dameron,” Snoke said, quieter this time. “You and I can bring the end of the New Republic--you don’t have to watch them spit on your mother’s grave like this any longer. All you have to do is commit yourself to our way of the Force.” Snoke smiled, or came as close to a smile as his disfigured face would allow. “Kill Kylo Ren.”

The bottom fell out of Poe’s stomach.

“Master Snoke, what--” Ren spluttered.

“Your powers are still growing--an effect of originating from that tree, I suppose.” Snoke continued to ignore Ren even as he protested louder, growing close to incoherent. “You’d make a useful apprentice.”

“ _Master Snoke--_ ”

“Lord Vader was tested in this way, you know. After the Clone Wars. Took out the future Emperor’s own apprentice… opening up the position for himself.”

Before him, Ren’s face was lit with the blue and red of the lightsabers in his hands, coming to a light purple in the center of his face where the fear sat thickly, conspicuously, without pretense. It would be almost too easy, two lightsabers in his hand against a defenseless man sprawled on the ground. And he did hate him--hated him for the terror inflicted on his friends and on that village in Jakku, for skewering Han Solo, his own father, without hardly a second thought, for turning his back on what his family had worked for in hopes to destroy it.

Ren’s was an anger that Poe could not understand, not even to trace its origin.

And the parallel had been drawn between the two of them since the beginning, when this all started; and for the first time, Poe looked down and saw the truth of it all, the gulf that had been holding apart the split between them the whole time.

They had never known Poe, not really, only looking for the tiniest refractions of themselves in him and discarding the rest.

“Kill him, Poe Dameron, and we can--”

“Yeah, no thanks.” Poe took two quick strides over the to the holoprojector and ran the tip of Rey’s blue lightsaber into the center, a shower of sparks flying into the dust. Resheathing them, he slid them into the back of his pants on either side of the blaster and turned back to Rey, Finn, and Ren with a small shrug.

Rey’s face lit up with a wide grin even as her eyes shone with worry that had melted into relief. And Finn’s hands still hadn’t moved from their grip along the bark of that tree, but there was a tug on that line that connected them. A reassurance, a soft hand tracing the outlines of his fingers.

Just as Poe was going to ask what their next move was, he heard the distinctive rumble of a Resistance shuttle overheard; it landed right in front of the Falcon, the squeak of its door opening drowned out by Chewbacca roaring in what sounded like distress.

“Chewie, hold on. Everything is _fine_ ,” the General said as she marched off the shuttle and straight toward them. “And before you three ask,” she called, “if I get a message about having a bad feeling, you better kriffing bet I’m going to follow up--”

She saw him then, Ren. Poe couldn’t imagine that she hadn’t felt him as soon as they broke into Ord Mirit’s atmosphere, but she froze all the same like it had been unexpected. Steeled herself. Continued on--the only difference lying in the harder set of her shoulders.

“Mother,” Ren murmured. “I…”

The General glanced down at him, pained, before turning to Rey and helping pull the branch from her hands. They had cemented shut in the tension. “It’s okay. I’ll be okay. Go find Luke, he’ll want to talk to you.”

Rey nodded and headed over to the shuttle, only pausing as she passed Chewbacca. He put one of his large hairy paws on her shoulder, offering some words of encouragement in Shyriiwook, and it brought a small grin to her face. How Rey had come to understand him so quickly wasn’t something he’d ever figured out--

“Are you all right?” The General was staring at him, then at Finn. When they nodded, she added, “Anything to report?” She’d pulled Ren up by the elbow, latching around it with both arms and Chewbacca on the other side.

“No,” Poe said. “I mean--not right now. I can wait.”

“Copy that, Commander,” she sighed. “Luke and I will take the Falcon back to Selvaris with Ben. You three head to the shuttle; Chewie will make sure you get there, okay?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

With each step she took toward the ships, a needle of pain shot through his feet, what he knew was only an echo of her own. But there was the tug again pulling his attention away, back to the trees where Finn still stood against the trunk of the tallest one there jutting into the skyline. There across the distance, Finn beamed at him like he was the only thing in the galaxy worth looking at and his heart swelled to proportions he hadn’t known were possible. The stranger on the star destroyer coming back again and again to save his life with a trust he had started to think he maybe deserved.

Poe couldn’t have measured the length of his strides, but in close to no time he had crossed the field, a hammering against his chest and their chests were nearly pressed together. “Gods, Finn, I wish I had done this sooner.”

He took Finn’s face in his hands and kissed him--tenderly, softly. Finn gasped into his mouth and pulled him closer, burying his hands in his hair and licking past his lips and finding his tongue, pressing gently until they opened up completely to each other and Poe’s frame enveloped him against the tree trunk. The surface of his skin was burning up and scalding hotter wherever they touched--an intoxicating rush, and he chased it. Hands over Finn’s cheeks, running down to his waist and tracing the thin line of skin peeking out between his shirt and trousers. Sweetness under his fingertips that left him out of breath but that troublesome spot in his chest at a calm, even keel.

When they finally pulled apart, they were still panting into each other’s mouths, half reaching back to close the distance again. “I love you too, you know,” Poe whispered. “ _In_ love, I mean.”

Finn smiled, a wide star-bright thing, eyes crawling all over his face. “Kriff, man.”

Slowly Poe brushed his lips over Finn’s again, and Finn only smiled into it more.

“Poe,” he said. “We stay here any longer and they might leave us behind.”

Poe snorted. “They wouldn’t--”

“We might,” Luke called from the shuttle, waving his gloved hand. “I wouldn’t want to press your luck.” Behind him, Rey hid her laughter behind her hands, a luxury Tabala wasn’t affording them in the slightest.

Poe offered his hand to Finn, which he took so quickly that it must have been on instinct. “Shall we, then?”

They moved themselves into the back corner of the shuttle, squeezed between the wall on one side and Tabala on the other; and as the dusty earth of Ord Mirit fell away, Finn wove their fingers together, pressed a kiss behind his ear. Hesitant but eager, too, as if he had been waiting his entire life and then some to show such simple affection.

And for the first time since that fateful crash landing, Poe felt that he had escaped the pull of Dantooine’s gravity for good.

* * *

 

 _“--I don’t know what kind of wildlife they had on Akiva, but_ gods _, you two. You should’ve seen Snap’s face when that mott stumbled into his campsite. Sure, it’s big, it has a horn on its nose and looks a little unfriendly, but the way he screamed… have you ever heard Iolo if you sneak up behind him? It was worse than that. So of course Snap’s screaming scared the poor thing and sent it running. Y’know, right towards him. So soon we’ve got this flabby orange thing chasing down one of our top pilots like it was actually dangerous, and C3PO dove out of the way so fast he didn’t look where he was jumping--”_

_“Right into Statura--”_

_“--who wanted nothing to do with whatever he was going on about. Took Karé and Nien Nunb_ and _Ematt to steer the mott back into the jungle. Ackbar would’ve helped but--”_

_“--but he was too busy laughing. I don’t think anyone has heard him laugh like that before.”_

The holo recording flickered for a moment as Rey turned to double check with Jessika. Both of them were hiding their own fit of giggles reimagining the scene, and even across the vast distance of space and the shorter one of time, Finn had to fight its contagious nature.

 _“Well_ , _”_ Jessika said. _“Skywalker was definitely paying more attention to his and the General’s reactions to the whole thing than the giant beast tearing through...kriff, what they’re calling a central command right now.”_

 _“It was good to see her smile, though_ ,” Rey said quietly. And just to Jessika--her head had turned away from them, and right where the projection cut off, her arms moved like she was taking Jessika’s hand in her own and drawing lines with her fingers along her knuckles.

Jessika looked down, smiling grimly. _“Yeah you’re right. So,”_ she continued, tone back to some semblance of casual, though its slippage was evident. _“You two have been gone for half a day--Snap nearly gets eaten by a herbivore and the top brass is nowhere near a decision on what to do with that Imperial wannabe. You should leave more often if it means Snap embarrassing himself.”_

 _“But actually,”_ Rey said. _“She means nothing of the sort because, as you can see, we’re sending you a holo already.”_ She moved behind Jessika’s back, slinging her arms around her neck, head on her shoulder. Both of them pouted pathetically. _“We miss you.”_

Beside him, Poe laughed and reached for BB-8 to pause the recording. But he hesitated, pulling back to loop his arm in his.

“What?” Finn said.

“Nothing, just…”

Rey and Jessika’s holo forms were staring at each other, grinning into a kiss. It was a shame that holos only came in shades of blue; Finn had been tracking the flush that rose to Rey’s cheeks when Jessika kissed her, flirted with her, was even _near_ her, and he was willing to put a number of credits on this one, one he couldn’t see for himself, having been a deep shade of crimson.

“Jessika would have thought this was blackmail material before Starkiller, you know,” Poe said as the recording ended. “It’s just different.”

“But a good different.” He thought back to when the shuttle landed on Selvaris after picking them up at Ord Mirit, how Jessika’s face lit up like a nova when they all disembarked, how she cried and literally swept Rey off her feet when they reached each other.

“Obviously.”

The bunk on the small shuttle they had borrowed was a touch wider than the cots back on the base on D’Qar, though they stayed pressed together. Legs tangled, Poe’s chest laid up against Finn’s back as he kissed the nape of his neck.

“Poe?"

“Hm?”

He swallowed the question. _What do you think the General and Skywalker are going to do with Kylo?_ It wasn’t something that should have been asked, nor that Poe had any answer to. Nobody did--before taking off from Selvaris, he’d heard Statura muttering to himself about how the fractious New Republic Senate could hardly go one session without an attempt at a filibuster over something as trivial as basic procedure. How were they supposed to begin to address head-on Kylo Ren, much less the First Order?

Besides, they were on orders not to worry over Resistance matters for the next week, an easy feat when Poe’s arms were wrapped around him and he had the image of Rey touching foreheads with the only pilot in the Resistance able to out-intimidate a Jedi-in-training--there was a contentedness and safety in the mix of the two.

“What is it, Finn?”

He turned over, kissing Poe just beneath his eye. “It’s nothing.”

Poe grinned at him and his heart grew sweet-warm--and while he was still getting used to the idea of being Force-sensitive, the thread that tied the two of them together was something he was starting to wonder how he had ever lived without. He felt it tug tighter the longer Poe stared, and finally it was too much. He rolled on top of Poe, pinning his arms on either side of his head and kissing him until they were both dizzy with it.

“I knew it wasn’t nothing,” Poe murmured, fighting back gasps as Finn nipped down his neck.

“It _was_ nothing,” Finn said. “You’re just… very distracting.” He kissed him again, open-mouthed and hot, and the hum of Poe’s moan against his tongue sent him grappling to pull off Poe’s shirt. And his own. Anything that was offering the slightest bit of separation between them. “Thank stars this ship has autopilot, yeah?”

“Stop talking and get my kriffing pants off, man.” Poe swatted at Finn’s hip. “And yours, too. They’re not going to do us any good--”

“Someone’s impatient,” he laughed.

“If you were looking up at someone who looked like you, then you’d understand.”

“Why do you think I _don’t_ understand?” he said. “We’ve been over this.” He yanked Poe’s pants off his hips, then shimmying out of his own--and he was half content to stay like this, skin on skin, sucking a bruise into Poe’s neck and dialing up the pitch of the tiny sounds he was making until they were close to squeaks.

When Finn finally entered him, he moved steadily. Slowly. They had all the time they could possibly ask for, traveling across the wide reaches of the galaxy. Each moan he pulled from Poe melded into the high whirring of hyperspace outside the ship and the Force-thread at their chests pulled tauter and tauter.

“I love you,” Poe whined. “Kriff, I love you--” His fingers dug into Finn’s back--they cried out in unison, and in the white bursts behind his eyes Finn could see the line tying them together, really see it. Against the blank white background it simmered hot, a fiery honey and just as thick.

Finn slid off of him, tucking his head into Poe’s shoulder and kissing a line up to his earlobe. The air in their section of the shuttle was heavy and warm--somewhere closer to the cockpit, BB-8 beeped that they would be arriving within the hour, but that still meant there was time to wrap a stray curl of Poe’s hair around his little finger. Tilt it in the light until it caught the shine just right.

“I could play with your hair forever,” Finn said.

“I wish you would.”

“We don’t have forever, though.”

Poe propped himself up on his elbow, ran his thumb along Finn’s hairline and down to the corner of his mouth. “That’s kind of defeatist, isn’t it?”

**********

The way that Poe had spoken about home, Finn had expected it to be quiet: a pre-fab house in the middle of the jungle reachable only by ship, speeder, or the most daring of hikers, a long ways away from the bustle of the villages and city centers. But as soon as he stepped off the ship, he was inundated with a grating buzz of insects underlying a low warbling that sounded familiar in a way he couldn’t place.

The sun, baking the soupy air, was leaning closer and closer to the edge of the treeline in the distance; and there was a pull toward the sky that held his head there, gaping, as Poe grinned widely to himself.

“Lost track of the calendar here,” Poe said. “It’s not this hot all year. Just this half.”

A man with peppery gray hair stood on the front steps of the house, hands in his pocket and kind wrinkles lining his eyes--the same color, Finn realized even at this distance, that had been staring into his own just moments earlier. And just as kind.

The man made his way down to the grassy expanse out front, meeting them halfway. “Hijo, it’s been too long. What’s this?” His first finger touched on the scar under Poe’s right eye.

“Pa, I’m fine! Stop,” he said softly, grinning. “I know you have worse scars than that one.”

“I know, I know… but I’m your father. I can have different standards for you.” He turned to Finn now, beaming. “You must be Finn. I heard quite a bit about you a few months ago,” he said, and he took one of Finn’s hands in both of his own. “I’m Kes. I owe you an immeasurable debt for saving my son.”

“I--um,” he stuttered. “It’s nothing, I--”

But Kes waved his hand. “I know it’s not nothing, and so do you. Shara tried to tell me the same thing the first time she saved my hide, but it never fooled anyone.” He paused and offered Poe a look that must have meant something between the two of them because Poe ducked his head and developed a sudden cough. “Anyway,” Kes said. “I have something on the burners back inside for dinner that I should check on. Go show your novio around.”

Finn had never seen Poe’s face so red.

“Novio?”

“It’s…” Poe sighed, but rather than answer, he reached down to hold his hand. “I want to show you something.”

He led Finn around to the back of the house, toward the looming tree that rose far above the rooftop as well as the surrounding trees, its golden leaves shimmering in the setting sun. The roots under their feet stretched deep into the earth--Finn could feel them as they burrowed, rustling under the weight of the rest of the moon’s surface.

“I used to climb this tree every day,” Poe said. “It was my favorite place to watch the sunset until Ma… well. Pa mainly, after--they’d call me in for dinner. Ma, she’s…” He pointed to a stone at the base of the trunk. “She liked this tree almost as much as I do. We thought she’d want to be there.”

Poe’s voice had shrunk, his grip on Finn’s hands growing firmer as it did, but it didn’t keep his feet stuck to the ground. He led Finn forward, right to the base of the towering figure, and there he could see how the elements had weathered smooth the carefully chiseled name, turning the angles of the letters soft. Down in Poe’s chest, Finn sensed something wobbling, the echoes of it traveling down his arm where their hands met.

“Hey.” Finn brought Poe close with his free hand, kissing him gently. “Show me where you used to watch the sunset.”

They couldn’t go all the way to the top; they couldn’t go very far up at all, given their combined weight and the way the branches stretched all spindly before too long. One studier shoot laid high enough that they could see over the roof of the house and the glowing window over the kitchen sink where Kes was splattering himself with water doing the dishes. Straddling it, Finn leaned against the trunk, held Poe close to him until his back was flush with his chest and he could prop his chin on his shoulder.

The sun ducked behind the trees and the large winged silhouettes breaching forth from them--and without the orb claiming all of the sky for its own, it could shift into a lavender, somehow pale and vibrant at the same time. “You were right,” Finn murmured into his neck. “I do love it here.”

The trunk glowed warmly against his back as they watched the sky fall into a deeper violet, then finally to black.

“Hey Finn?”

“Yeah?”

Poe hummed for a moment as Finn brushed a lone curl back behind his ear. “Do you think Luke would still be okay with me sitting in on Rey’s lessons?”

“You want to be a Jedi?”

(Poe, standing tall in the glow of a lightsaber at the end of his hand as he jumps from the cockpit of his X-wing, there was something right about it--)

“I--I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.” He turned his head and pressed his nose into Finn’s cheek. “Do you?”

“I don’t know either,” he sighed. The thought was tempting. Terrifying. Yet still tempting, the trunk of the tree warming every time he strayed back to the idea. “But we have time to figure that out before diving back into it all.”

“We have a week,” he laughed.

“That’s still time.”

Poe opened his mouth to say something, halfway to rolling his eyes, but he was cut off by Kes calling from the window. Dinner was ready, he was saying, and though he knew he didn’t need to say it after all these years, _no_ he didn’t burn anything. Not this time, not when Poe was home for the first time in ages with his novio. (He made a note to ask Rey when they returned. Surely she would know--)

Hopping down to the ground, Finn paused and knelt at Shara’s gravemarker. In the dark, he could see the two dots on the far left side of the letter shen had merged into the rest of it. One slight touch and his fingers came away burning.

“Wait, Finn--come here,” Poe said suddenly.

“What?” He jumped to his feet and ran behind him to where Poe stood pointing to one of the lower hanging branches. “What is it?”

“Did you see a blue--I…” He shook his head and smiled at his feet. “Nevermind.”

“See what?”

“I forget how this place plays tricks on your eyes,” he said, taking Finn’s hand as they meandered back to the house. “That’s probably all it was.”

“You’re not a great liar, you know.”

Finn snuck a kiss to Poe’s cheek, missing and landing on his ear instead; the sound of Poe laughing was a sound he knew he would never get used to, and he wanted to revel in it while they could. He wouldn’t press the matter of the trick on his senses. There would be time for that later, just as there would be time for everything else hanging low over them like the arc of Yavin on the far horizon. They would make it wait, hang there in limbo. They would make the whole war wait--Kes was promising them plantains, and they were only going to grow cold.


End file.
